Paper Dragon

Powering Infrastructure For a Cloud Services Startup

PaperDragon, a cloud infrastructure startup building a marketplace for computing power, needed an application for users to provision virtual machines across providers. Ollon built the full user portal, front and back end, with an architecture flexible for each provider's needs. Customers can now provision infrastructure from whichever provider fits their region without touching that provider's systems.

Situation

PaperDragon had a vision of becoming the Airbnb for computing power, providing customers with access to private cloud infrastructure through a public cloud consumption model. To enable this vision, they needed to build a customer facing application that would allow users to sign in, provision virtual machines, and interact with multiple infrastructure providers. As a new business, they required a strong technical foundation to launch operations and scale effectively.

Solution

Ollon developed a fully functional user portal, delivering both the front and back ends to support integration with multiple managed hosting providers. The team built a flexible architecture capable of handling the unique specifications and requirements of each provider. Close collaboration with stakeholders ensured the platform was aligned with business needs while remaining adaptable to future growth.

Results

The application now serves as the central interface for customers to access and manage virtual machines, forming a critical link between end users and backend providers. With the platform live in production, the client has been able to begin serving customers and running business operations. Ollon continues to develop additional features beyond the MVP and support the product as it grows.

Technologies

Node JS, React, Docker, Cloud Stack, Open Stack, MySQL

Our Expertise in Action

Custom application development

Paper Dragon needed a customer facing application built from the ground up to support its plan for reselling private cloud infrastructure through a public style consumption model. Ollon delivered the full application, a React front end and a Node JS backend, letting customers sign in and provision virtual machines directly. The team built the platform to work across multiple infrastructure providers, including CloudStack and OpenStack environments as well as commercial providers added over time, each with its own technical requirements the application had to accommodate. Ollon continues to build new features into the platform as Paper Dragon's business grows beyond its original MVP.

Business System Integrations

Connecting one customer facing application to several outside infrastructure vendors was a core requirement for Paper Dragon, a Toronto startup building a marketplace for private cloud computing power. Ollon integrated the application with multiple third party providers, including SharkTech, Latitude, and Simnet, each with its own API for provisioning and authentication. The team built the integration layer to select a provider by region and bring new providers online as Paper Dragon added them. That layer is what let Paper Dragon offer customers infrastructure from whichever provider fit their region, without customers ever needing to deal with SharkTech, Latitude, or Simnet's own systems directly.

CloudStack

Paper Dragon needed customers to provision virtual machines on CloudStack without running into infrastructure problems themselves. Ollon built the application layer that lets Paper Dragon's customers provision and manage virtual machines running on CloudStack directly through the platform. During development, Ollon's team traced and fixed a networking issue where CloudStack was failing to create networks correctly without a SNAT or a gateway configured, a problem that affected the create network flow used across the platform's front end. That fix meant customers could create a network on CloudStack through the platform without hitting a failure that would have blocked their access to a working virtual machine.

OpenStack

Provisioning virtual machines on OpenStack was one part of a larger integration ticket Ollon delivered for Paper Dragon's platform, alongside the provider specific components built for CloudStack and other backends. Ollon implemented the OpenStack side of that work so customers could provision machines on OpenStack through the same interface used for other providers. Later, the team reworked how the application mapped OpenStack images to virtual machines after finding that images could be decommissioned on the provider side, remapping the platform to a more generic image structure so a machine could still be created even after the original image ID changed.

Containerization

Paper Dragon's platform runs on containerized infrastructure that Ollon set up and has maintained since the project began. The backend API runs on ECS, with Terraform used to provision the network, VPC, and surrounding infrastructure as code. Ollon's team has worked through container specific issues as they came up, including a Docker configuration problem during setup and ongoing deployment pipeline failures that needed troubleshooting to keep staging and production pushes reliable.