Virtual Cloud Providers

Introduction

Virtual Cloud Providers is the mechanism by which multiple accounts can be handled for the same cloud service.

Before the release of the Virtual Cloud Providers add-on feature, WPCloudDeploy could only make use of a single account at each cloud provider. This meant that admins could not set up multiple accounts for different branches inside a company or use a customer-owned account with better rates.

The Virtual Cloud Provider add-on addresses this issue.

Some reasons you might need this:

You have multiple departments or branches in your company, each with their own cloud-service account or budget.
You have customers that want to use their own accounts
You have separate accounts for development, staging and production.

Installation

The Virtual Cloud Provider add-on is just a regular WordPress plugin – upload and activate it from the WordPress PLUGINS screen.

Creating Virtual Cloud Providers

When the add-on is activated a new option will appear under the WPCloud Deploy menu item. Click on it and then click the ADD NEW VIRTUAL CLOUD PROVIDER button at the top of the screen. This will bring you to a screen that looks like this:

The two important items here are:

The name of the Virtual Cloud Provider
The cloud provider type (i.e: DigitalOcean, Linode, AWS EC2 etc.)

All other fields are optional.

Click the PUBLISH or SAVE button and the virtual provider will be created.

Connect the virtual provider to an account

Once you have created the virtual provider, you will need to connect it to an account, just like you would for any other provider. This can be done under the SETTINGS screen.

Go to WPCLOUDDEPLOY->SETTINGS->CLOUD PROVIDERS tab. Your new virtual provider should be listed just like regular providers – other than the name, there is no distinction between them.

Notes

You should use a different set of credentials for each virtual provider. We cache data based on those credentials so the system could use data from a different provider if you duplicate credentials. For most cloud providers such as DigitalOcean and AWS, you can create new API keys to get access to the same account. For others such as UpCloud you’ll need to create entirely new accounts. Normally you don’t need to use virtual providers to access the same account (there’s little point to it) but, in the case of AWS and ALIBABA, you would need to do so in order to set up one for each region.
We strongly advise against deleting virtual providers after they are created and used on a server. If you must delete one then make sure that all servers that use it have been deleted prior [to attempting to delete the provider.]