News

cloudscale recently once again successfully passed the recertification audit for compliance with ISO/IEC 27001, 27017 and 27018. For the first time, the revised "27001:2022" standard was applied, which provides a more integrated view of "information security management systems" (ISMSs) than the previous version of the standard.

Everyone is talking about "AI" technology with the hopes it raises of being used in the most varied areas of life. You no doubt already also have ideas of how you can improve everything with intelligent tools. There are many freely available building blocks on the internet, and the new cloudscale GPU servers now provide you with the required computing power to go full throttle with the appropriate model.

We have all come across it in the context of bicycle repairs or gardening: some people like the challenge of doing it themselves, while others prefer to hire a professional. It is no different with the cloud. While our virtual servers offer full root access, you may not want to run software yourself, but "simply" to use it. This is why we have recently added a wide range of managed services to our marketplace, which are offered by our partners and run on the solid cloudscale infrastructure.

Everyone knows what to do: an optimized config here, a new version there, and never skip regular security updates. Although everything normally works out well, it is never possible to exclude problems completely. However, this should not be a reason for you not to keep your systems updated! You can now use our API to create snapshots of your volumes to ensure a return to a functioning system – just in case.

cloudscale has provided S3-compatible object storage at each location for some time now. Here, costs are based solely on actual occupancy and use of storage, and will be noticeably reduced from 2025-02-01 onwards. You can also find out about the technical background and optimal use of object storage.

Cyberlink Ltd acquires 40 percent of cloudscale.ch Ltd – A strong signal for the future of the Swiss cloud industry.

If you are interested in technical details and if you sometimes wish you could watch our professionals at work, then our new engineering blog is just the thing for you. This is where members of our cloudscale team share unfiltered insider knowledge from a personal perspective. Find out more about their tricky challenges, their tips and favourite tools as well as general insights into their work in the "engine room" of our cloud.

We love cloudscale, and it shows. We were delighted when our new zip-up hoodies were delivered recently – just in time for the cooler weather outside. But of course, our hoodies aren't just comfortable and warm: the attention to detail that you know from our cloud services also makes this versatile piece of clothing something very special. Whether for the office, leisure or when you're out and about: get yourself some cloudscale to wear and show that you value quality as much as we do.

2 Swiss tech pioneers offer new solutions for the financial & healthcare sectors. – The digital world never stands still and in Switzerland, two companies are working tirelessly to provide developers and DevOps teams in compliance-sensitive industries with the infrastructure they desire: cloudscale.ch & Cyberlink. With the introduction of the SCION Cloud, the Swiss cloud and connectivity providers set new standards in terms of protection, availability and compliance. But how did this come about and what does it mean for the community? A look behind the scenes with cloudscale.ch CEO Manuel Schweizer, Cyberlink CEO Thomas Knüsel and Cyberlink Lead Network Engineer Matthias Schwarzenbach.

Let's go back to 2014 when there were already clouds, but we were missing a user friendly option with a data location in Switzerland. This is why, after the idea had been floating around in various people's minds for a while, we founded cloudscale.ch AG in 2014. We embarked on our journey properly when we started work in our first office in Zurich Oerlikon at 09:09 h on 09/09 (there was no way we were going to leave such a memorable moment to chance!). A lot has happened since then and, as is fitting for a tenth anniversary, we would like to use this opportunity to review some of the highlights.

Floating IPs help you to increase the availability of your application and make it easier to manage your setup. They can be moved between virtual servers so that incoming traffic is always routed to the desired server. They are also retained if you want or need to replace a server completely. Use these advantages not only for servers that directly provide a service, but also for your firewalls.

In early July, a security vulnerability in OpenStack was disclosed, which could be exploited through custom images in QCOW2 format. In addition to the measures we took immediately, we are now undertaking small changes in the custom image import process in order to best protect security for us and our customers in future, too. Our aim here is to inform you about the background and about what you need to be aware of with automated imports.

A cloud service such as cloudscale is based on the most varied of systems, which means that maintaining an overview is essential. In this context, we have recently started using NetBox, which collects a wealth of information and settings relating to all components in a central location and provides this inventory as a basis for engineering and operations.

Not every server should be accessible directly from the Internet. Segmentation into several networks may make particular sense in terms of security, e.g. to shield database servers or to filter traffic on a central firewall. Our cloud control panel allows you to maintain an overview, even when there are numerous private networks, thus minimizing the risk of configuration errors.

At cloudscale, you only book and pay for what you actually use. This means, for example, that you can change the compute flavor of your servers at any time or even extend volumes during live operations. Despite our simple price structure, this may result in "skewed" prices or potentially in project costs that change from day to day. With the new billing report, you can now see a detailed list of the actual to-the-second costs.

Kubernetes setups at cloudscale can now interact even more closely with our infrastructure: Our Cloud Controller Manager (CCM) enables the enrichment of node metadata with information from our API as well as the automated use of our load balancer product.

"Simple, yet beautiful" – our aim from the very beginning applies more than ever now that cloudscale has a new look. At first glance, it may seem as if everything has changed, but closer inspection reveals that our fresh appearance is simply an enhanced expression of what we have always been. We love it! How about you?

In today's age of video streaming, increasingly large data quantities need to be transmitted at ever increasing speeds. However, fast connections are also essential for data transfer between servers, which is why we recently significantly upgraded the route-redundant direct connection between our two cloud regions Rümlang (RMA) and Lupfig (LPG).

Cyberattacks are a daily topic in news reports and people have in the meantime become used to short-term disruption and interruptions. However, certain applications require a greater degree of availability and reliability than the architecture of today's Internet can provide. SCION offers a new approach here: developed in Switzerland, it promises greater reliability, trust and control for the networking of market participants in critical areas, such as the financial and health sectors.

After many years of not being an issue for most people, inflation has once again become an ever-present topic. Energy prices, which have been increasing rapidly, not least because of the current international situation, are making particular headlines. cloudscale.ch is also at the mercy of this market environment, which is why some of our prices are being adjusted from 2024-01-01.

You can use our Terraform provider to manage your resources at cloudscale.ch "as code". By grouping your cloud resources into different projects, you can separate them clearly according to your specific requirements. In the following we would like to introduce a Terraform feature that is easy to overlook, but that you can use to combine these benefits in order to use a single Terraform repository to manage cloud resources in multiple projects.

Data protection and data security are pivotal when it comes to safeguarding the confidence and rights of people, known as "data subjects", whose data are being processed. The revised Federal Act on Data Protection means that awareness of this topic has once again come to the forefront, which is also reflected here at cloudscale.ch, where we receive frequent questions about it. In the following, we would like to look at some of the key points and explain how we deal with them, in particular also in terms of the data processing agreement that we make available to our customers.

At cloudscale.ch, there are no fixed costs or minimum terms and as a customer you only pay for what you actually use. And there is no catch: to-the-second billing means that you do not have to worry about adding on services when you need them as you can simply delete them again afterwards. While this benefit has remained unchanged, we have completely revised and simplified the mechanism behind it.

On Monday, 2023-07-24, it was announced that researcher Tavis Ormandy had found a CPU vulnerability in the AMD Zen 2 platform. Tavis Ormandy described the hole in detail on his website. As we now mainly rely on AMD CPUs here at cloudscale.ch, we realized immediately that we were affected by this security hole. Using the proof-of-concept code that was published together with the description, we were then able to confirm this.

As we have already mentioned previously, here at cloudscale.ch we love automated testing. We are also great fans of type-safe languages. Since we started increasingly using TypeScript in our front-end GUI, the question has arisen more frequently about how we can write good tests for our TypeScript code. This is why we want to look in more detail at the world of unit testing and TypeScript and to share with you a code snippet that has made our life significantly easier.

We regularly add new functionalities to our cloud offer and thus to our cloud control panel and the API. In this article, we would like to focus not on individual features but on milestones relating to the technology behind them, from Python and Django to React and to TypeScript. This technology is the foundation that makes it possible for our developers to concentrate on the essential and, at the same time, for you to benefit from a user-friendly web interface and numerous integrations in terms of automation tools.

Cloud computing is suitable for many areas of application, and its benefits are particularly discernible when computing power and storage space only need to be used temporarily, such as for software tests and deployments with GitLab. Our Ansible playbook and step-by-step instructions will help you to use GitLab runners on the cloudscale.ch infrastructure while benefiting from maximum performance with minimum costs.

Ensuring the greatest possible availability of an online service requires measures at various levels. Redundancy – a directly incorporated "plan B", so to speak – plays a key role here. Instead of engineering everything yourself, you can use our new load balancer service with immediate effect to create a sophisticated setup to optimize the continuous availability of your online service by means of redundancy.

Renew your subscription to stay up-to-date with our latest maintenance and service information in future, too. Once our status page has moved, you will have even greater flexibility in choosing the right medium for you: in addition to email and RSS/Atom feeds, you will also have the option of receiving the latest information directly on one of the supported chat platforms if desired.

Here at cloudscale.ch, we empower customers in Switzerland and around the world. At the press of a button (or even in a completely automated manner), the suitable infrastructure is always ready – as a self-service feature around the clock. Our engineers make sure that this works reliably and smoothly. With this article, we would like to provide an insight into our work at cloudscale.ch.

At cloudscale.ch, we have always supported several means of payment for topping up your credit balance. This now also includes TWINT, the popular Swiss payment app. However, even with all the existing methods of payment, you will notice an updated look and feel associated with our switch to a new payment service provider.

Further training and contact with like-minded people – in the open source community and beyond – are integral components of our work at cloudscale.ch. With the end of the year approaching, we are delighted to look back on the many interesting events of 2022 and at the same time to look forward to further rewarding events and encounters in the new year.

New cloudscale.ch employees usually bring a great deal of experience with them. However, onboarding as one of our engineers still involves a learning process where we accompany our new team members both in person and with prepared modules. One of these modules consists of "cloud exercises", which provide an overview of our services and enable new employees to get to know various supported deployment tools. As exercises from a user perspective, they are equally suitable for our customers and partners, which is why we have also published them on GitHub.

From the clear layout of your cloud resources to our transparent, purely linear price structure: it has always been important to us here at cloudscale.ch to have an easy-to-use cloud offer. In this article, we would like to give you a few tips about our cloud control panel to help you achieve your day-to-day goals even more elegantly.

There are almost daily media reports on a possible energy shortage in Switzerland, which may occur in the latter part of this winter. Many things are still unclear at the moment, from the risk of this actually occurring, to the preventive measures that need to be taken and to potential consequences. As a cloud provider, we know how important reliable server operation is for our customers, which is why we would like to inform you of the facts we are currently aware of.

The new compute flavors that we introduced on 2022-07-01 offer a wide range of advantages. During a transition phase, existing servers and automated setups with old flavors are running unchanged in parallel. Benefit now by selecting the new flavor that best suits your individual use case by 2022-08-31 at the latest.

Flexibility is one of the many advantages of using cloud services. You have always had the choice of various "compute flavors" at cloudscale.ch that you can switch between at any time with no notice period. Following numerous customer requests, we are now introducing compute flavors with different memory/CPU ratios effective 2022-07-01. In addition to comparable new flavors to replace the existing ones, there are now also "CPU-optimized" and "memory-optimized" flavors to cover the needs of more special workloads. Also effective 2022-07-01, we are reducing our prices: The prices of the new Plus flavors are lowered by 25% and the larger Flex flavors even by 33%!

While data make their way through the Internet to their destination using numeric IP addresses, the Domain Name System ("DNS") ensures that these IPs remain concealed behind user-friendly domain names. Almost unnoticed in day-to-day processes, the DNS translates domain names into IP addresses and vice versa, which is why it is often compared to a telephone directory. Find out how we manage our part of this globally distributed database here at cloudscale.ch.

"Information security" requires permanent work and needs to be taken into account for all activities. It does not simply involve a one-off product purchase that can be crossed off your to-do list. Certification in accordance with, for example, ISO/IEC 27001 is only issued for a limited period of time and is audited regularly. We are delighted to inform you that the certificate for cloudscale.ch has been renewed without interruption following a successful recertification audit.

Whether ready-to-use appliances, specialized distributions or your individual config, with custom images you can create cloud servers that are ideally prepared for their intended purpose from the very first start-up. Managing and using custom images has now become even easier, which means that you can build on the appropriate image in any situation.

Although "IT" and "business management" often seem to be far removed from each other in everyday life, they are actually closely connected. Nowadays, IT infrastructure is the lifeblood of many companies, which means it is just as much a focus for auditors as, for instance, accounts. For this reason and with immediate effect, cloudscale.ch is offering a report based on the ISAE 3000 standard to customers whose audits also cover outsourced IT processes, thus helping them to adhere to internal and external compliance requirements.

Here at cloudscale.ch, we believe that accounts are something personal: every account belongs to a person and should not be shared. This ensures that it is possible to select truly personal and secure login credentials and, ideally, also two-factor authentication (2FA). Our cloud control panel has a range of features that facilitate collaboration, irrespective of how it is "organized". We would like to use a fictional example to illustrate the available options and the different aspects of the various approaches.

Cloud projects are frequently based on teamwork, and project boundaries do not always correspond to the boundaries of a company or another organization. The new "partner organizations" feature allows you to replicate these kinds of constellations in our cloud control panel, too. You can grant partner organizations access to selected projects or add members of your own organization to your partners' projects just as you would assign responsibilities in collaborative projects in the real world.

"Infrastructure as code" with Terraform normally means that you first define the infrastructure you require in config files and that Terraform then uses your specifications to create the infrastructure in practice. However, thanks to "import" functionality, you can also include existing resources in your Terraform setup for further management. In addition, "data sources" can be utilized to read and use further values that relate, for example, to resources in separate Terraform setups.

If applications are to maintain persistent data in a Kubernetes setup, CSI is what you are looking for. The "container storage interface" makes it possible to automatically provide persistent volumes on the correct node so that they can be mounted into the desired pod. Some applications, however, are unable to store their data in the form of files in a mounted file system, but require direct disk access. Our cloudscale.ch CSI driver now supports so-called "raw block volumes" for such use cases.

The cloudscale.ch infrastructure not only forms the basis for services we offer, but also provides the backbone for everything that our customers build on it. This is why our monitoring continuously checks that all our components are "up" and interacting as they should and raises an alert if an intervention is required. Over time, we have increasingly fine-tuned and optimized our monitoring, which means that even problems within the monitoring setup do not remain undetected and that, at the same time, unnecessary alerts are reduced to a minimum.

With immediate effect, it is possible to collaborate on a project with accounts outside your organization in our cloud control panel. The new "external collaborators" feature covers a range of scenarios and allows you, for example, to manage cloud resources together with customers, suppliers or partners, and to grant different access rights for this purpose.

At cloudscale.ch, we place great value on performance – even when it is not the main focus. This is why, during the most recent expansion of our bulk and object storage, we switched to "all flash" in this area, too. Consequently, our customers automatically benefit from improved access times to their bulk volumes and objects at no additional cost.

In many ways, an IaaS cloud offer is a drop-in replacement for a physical server, so if you already have experience of administering your own device or a dedicated server, you can use these same skills in a cloud server, too. However, it is probably worth taking a closer look at the additional features and some of the specific characteristics of the cloud. In this article we have provided an overview of tips to ensure you get the most out of your setup at cloudscale.ch.

Security is key when handling data and systems. Many companies have established detailed compliance specifications for this purpose. At the same time, security measures – in particular the increasing number of passwords – are often seen as cumbersome by employees. Linking our cloud control panel to your own identity provider gives you a double advantage: your employees will benefit from increased convenience in their day-to-day work with our cloud thanks to single sign-on, while you can be sure that the security standards you have defined also apply when accessing our control panel.

We have done it: the new cloud control panel is live! The most significant overhaul of the control panel since cloudscale.ch was established has not only come up trumps with a completely new user interface, but also with numerous new features, such as organizations, projects, and teams. With projects, for example, you can group exactly those resources that belong together, irrespective of whether you only want to keep test and productive environments separate or whether you want to segregate completely independent setups. Companies and other organizations will also benefit from the new member and rights management. Whether you work alone or in a team, you can be sure that your cloud infrastructure is under control.

When you have a complex technical solution developed, you want to be sure that you actually receive what was agreed on. This is why, especially in the IT sector, it is common practice to perform acceptance tests when a solution is handed over to a customer to ensure adherence to the specification. Standardized continuous services, such as cloud services, are subject to a constant handover process, which is exactly why, at cloudscale.ch, we have developed an "Acceptance Test Suite" and recently released it on GitHub. This provides you with an insight into part of our quality assurance process and allows you to see for yourself which standards we set for our cloud infrastructure.

We are nearly there and about to launch our new completely updated cloud control panel. The new options for the use of our offer meant that we had to adapt our Terms of Service (ToS). The updated ToS will apply to new customers with immediate effect and to existing customers from 2021-04-26. In the following, we provide an overview of the main changes.

Containers are the talk of the town due to their many benefits. They are just as well suited for short-term use of an application as they are for use as components in CI/CD pipelines or for operating highly available productive services in clusters. There are as many approaches for creating and running container setups as there are areas of application – and cloudscale.ch does not restrict your options. In the following we will provide a brief introduction to the world of containers and then show you how you can start running an "OKD" cluster at cloudscale.ch. OKD is a comprehensive Kubernetes distribution developed as an open source project that also provides the basis for Red Hat OpenShift.

"The cloud" is used as standard for many things today: we stream films from the cloud, back up our mobiles to the cloud and, whenever we access a service from a browser, there is a server somewhere in the network behind it. Nevertheless, many companies still run their own physical servers – often without appropriate safety measures in their offices – despite the countless advantages of a cloud infrastructure, even for numerous IT systems where one might not immediately think "cloud".

Ansible is a widely used automation tool for IT infrastructures, and the first integration with our cloud API already took place with its version 2.3. Since then we have continuously invested in and expanded its support. This article will use three simple examples to provide you with an insight into the most recent improvements, which have only been added since the launch of Ansible 2.10.0.

In addition to the popular, widespread and universally applicable Linux distributions, there are several specialized distributions and "virtual appliances" for the most varied requirements. And even with prevalent distributions, there are times when it makes sense to use an adapted installation as a base for new servers rather than the standard image. Thanks to "custom images" at cloudscale.ch, you can now adapt your virtual servers to your requirements even before the initial start-up, which minimizes subsequent configuration time.

If you work with computers, you will almost inevitably use "hard disks" in various shapes and sizes, such as the internal SSD, external drives, USB sticks, and memory cards. "Volumes" are the equivalent to this in the cloud, and cloudscale.ch has already been supporting the connection of several SSD and bulk volumes to your virtual servers. Up to 128 volumes are possible with immediate effect, which opens up new options for the automated set-up of containers, in particular.

With the topic of data protection attracting increasing attention, the issue of the geographical location of data storage remains key. It is, however, not the only factor that determines which law is ultimately applicable. The aim of the newly launched "swiss hosting" label is to create certainty here: as a customer, you not only have the security of knowing that your data are stored in Switzerland, but also that organizations from abroad are unable to gain access via circuitous routes. As a launch partner, cloudscale.ch has been involved in "swiss hosting" from the outset.

Many professionals see "Linux" and "command lines" as a fixed combination and do not believe that any other tool achieves the efficiency of a shell. This is why we are delighted to announce version 1.0 of our "cloudscale" command line interface (CLI) application. The CLI application interacts with our API and makes it possible for you to manage your cloud resources without leaving the command line.

Encryption is standard on the Internet today with almost all websites and services using "HTTPS" and therefore TLS for data transmission. This umbrella term covers numerous techniques and algorithms that are constantly being further developed. It goes without saying that the cloudscale.ch systems support today's technologies in order to provide the best possible protection for your data. Consequently, we are going to disable the now outdated TLS versions 1.0 and 1.1 on our systems from 2020-08-11.

Network engineering and system engineering often seem to be a long way apart, which is also emphasized by the completely different operating concepts of the respective devices. Our new switching infrastructure has shown us that this does not have to be the case. Thanks in no small part to the open source approach of Cumulus Linux, the two worlds are converging and creating synergies with existing tools and processes. In this article, we will take a look at selected aspects and show that the migration of our network has resulted in more than just faster switch ports.

As part of the cloud infrastructure, cloudscale.ch operates DNS resolvers that can be used by customer systems for name resolution. While this service has proven itself and will of course continue to be available in the future, we are reengineering the relevant systems at the cloud location in Rümlang. In this article we will inform you about which items to check and if necessary adjust with regard to your servers in the "RMA" region. At the new Lupfig location, we designed the DNS systems according to the new concept right from the start, which means there is no need to take any action for your servers in the "LPG" region.

Although you do not usually click through an OS installer manually to set up a new cloud server, each server still needs a certain degree of individual configuration. This is where cloud-init comes into play as a versatile package that takes care of all the basic settings required to get started with a new server. In addition, it allows you to perfectly integrate the server into your specific cloud environment and connect it to your own tools right from the start.

Based on a common definition, IaaS offerings consist of compute, storage, and network. While the first two areas often receive more attention, we will now devote two articles to our new switching infrastructure based on Cumulus Linux. In the first part, we will look at why the network is so important at cloudscale.ch, what the main advantages were that led us to the solution we use today, and how the new switching fabric affects our infrastructure as a whole.

In order to cleanly isolate your servers from the Internet and separate them into defined zones, cloudscale.ch already supports multiple private networks. You now have even more flexibility with the ability to define IP ranges according to your own scheme for your private networks and to make your work even easier by using additional DHCP options.

In the light of the rapid spread of coronavirus (COVID-19) throughout the world, we feel obliged to inform our customers about its (non-)impact on our services. In addition, we would like to show you how we will maintain operations and how we intend to play our part in delaying the global spread of the virus.

Even if it does not seem intuitively logical, "randomness" plays a central role in today's IT, especially in the area of security. The major strength of computers, however, lies in the complete opposite, namely in exact and reproducible calculations. There are, however, a number of special techniques available to generate good randomness – also at cloudscale.ch.

After the discovery of several security holes in processors over the last two years, two new vulnerabilities, "CacheOut" and "VRS", were disclosed this Monday. According to the current level of knowledge, the cloud services of cloudscale.ch are not affected by these new vulnerabilities, and there is no need for our customers to take action in this regard.

With "LPG", we recently put a second cloud region into operation in Lupfig (Canton of Aargau), which complements our existing "RMA" region in Rümlang (Canton of Zurich) and enables geo-redundant setups. On this occasion we would like to briefly inform you about some changes with regard to accessing your buckets/objects.

While "Linux" is arguably the typical operating system for cloud servers, detailed preferences can be quite diverse. At cloudscale.ch, you benefit on the one hand from a wide range of images of popular Linux distributions, while on the other hand you can use a small trick to also install almost any other system – and much more.

We are constantly evolving our cloud offering further. We have, for example, recently been able to announce improvements regarding volumes and private networks as well as the opening of our second cloud location. Of course, this also means adapting the tools that interact with our API. We have enhanced our Terraform plug-in in several steps so that you can also make the most of the new possibilities using Terraform.

Migrate even performance-hungry applications to cloudscale.ch now. Thanks to our brand new AMD-based hardware platform, you can benefit from dedicated CPU resources and up to 448 GB RAM per virtual server. This way, the computing power you need is guaranteed to be readily available at any time.

First things first: All services are now also available at a second, independent location. Thanks to top infrastructures in geographically separate data centers, it is now possible to design your setups geo-redundantly. It goes without saying that this not only applies to your servers; the new location also offers a separate Object Storage with the same familiar features.

Not every server should be directly accessible from the Internet. This is why our customers often make use of the possibility of strategically positioning servers in a private network and protecting them behind a firewall, a load balancer or a VPN. Now you can define multiple separate private networks, which allows you to build more complex setups tailored to your specific requirements.

One server seldom comes alone: another server is quickly added for the test environment, an additional volume holds archived data, and Floating IPs enable high availability. When the naming scheme hits its limits, the new tags feature helps to ensure that you always know what belongs together.

An increasing number of our users are turning to container virtualization with Docker. One of the key factors in this consists of the right tools for setting up and managing such installations. By providing drivers for Docker Machine and Rancher, cloudscale.ch supports developers in further automating their deployments – both on the command line and via web interface.

Good news from our storage department: Instead of "SSD-only" it is now "NVMe-only" – and thus even more performance at the same cost. In addition, "BlueStore", the new storage backend of our Ceph cluster, ensures the integrity of all your data thanks to its integrated checksums. And last but not least, we have extended our security concept by another layer of protection through hard disk encryption.

One of the advantages of our S3-compatible Object Storage is the usage-based billing: with no fixed costs, you will only be chrged for what you actually use. With Objects Metrics, you can now also retrieve usage data at a later date – for example for your own analysis, or to report it to end customers accurately to the day.

Information security is becoming increasingly important in public perception, and more and more cloud users want to be sure that their data is in good hands – this is where independent certificates such as ISO 27001 come into play. Having passed certification successfully, cloudscale.ch Ltd meets the need for certified information security. In the following we provide a brief insight into this important topic:

By now, it is common knowledge that new bugs in software are being discovered on a regular basis. The fact that security flaws can also be found in hardware became clear to a broader public in January 2018 when Meltdown and Spectre were making headlines. Last Tuesday, new vulnerabilities known as ZombieLoad, RIDL, and Fallout were disclosed, against which the affected systems now have to be protected.

Even if the acronym reminds of an American TV series at first: Thanks to supporting the "Container Storage Interface" (CSI), cloudscale.ch is one of the first providers worldwide to offer an elegant and flexible solution for using persistent storage in a Kubernetes setup.

In addition to the numerous Linux distributions to choose from, we now also offer OPNsense, a professional firewall distribution. Using OPNsense you can easily and effectively reduce the potential attack surface of your servers by placing critical systems in a private network behind your OPNsense firewall and protecting them from direct access from the Internet.

Recently, we updated our Ceph storage cluster to the latest version: "Mimic". Ceph Mimic lays the foundation for the future development of our storage cluster, but also brings tangible improvements for the continuous management of our storage systems. And last but not least, Mimic also incorporates numerous minor improvements, e.g. in the area of our S3-compatible object storage.

Thanks to the SSD-only root volume and an optional bulk volume, we already provide you with the optimal storage space for your application – both for heavily used data and for data that is accessed on rare occasions only. As of now, servers and volumes at cloudscale.ch are no longer tied to each other: You can add virtually any number of SSD and/or bulk volumes to your servers and even move them between your servers as required.

Sometimes things do not work out, in IT just as in everyday life. The more complex the processes, the more likely it is that some component will not behave as initially expected. At cloudscale.ch we really care about simple and consistent use. For us, this also includes being prepared for any eventuality that may occur behind the scenes – after all, our interfaces should not only be intuitive to use, but also help you reach your target in the best possible way.

React not only facilitates an improved user experience in our cloud control panel, but the JavaScript library also helps our developers to keep the source code maintainable. In addition to the comfort our users are used to, they also benefit from the rapid implementation of new features – both in our web-based GUI and in the API.

To us at cloudscale.ch it is important that the software we use is not only well-tested, but also up-to-date. While this allows for reliable operation of our systems, it also ensures the prompt availability of security updates. With OpenStack at the heart of our cloud, the upgrade to its major version "Pike" represents a milestone that we have mastered with minimal impact on productive operation.

At cloudscale.ch we are always striving to improve not only our products, but also our processes. One thing we have recently focused on is automated testing. To avoid breaking things as we move forward, we have developed a growing set of tests that are run before we deploy anything to production. In this short post, you will learn:

First things first: Please bookmark our new status page https://www.cloudscale-status.net right now in order to have access to the latest maintenance announcements and status information at any time. In this article you will learn:

Recently, two important security vulnerabilities code-named Meltdown and Spectre have been discovered independently by several parties including researchers at Graz University of Technology and Google Project Zero. At cloudscale.ch we take these threats very seriously and do our best to ensure the safety of our cloud infrastructure.

Recently, two important security vulnerabilities code-named Meltdown and Spectre have been discovered independently by several parties including researchers at Graz University of Technology and Google Project Zero. They were first published in a blog post by Google Project Zero on 2018-01-03 after rumors spread during the holiday season.

cloudscale.ch is growing – and with it the demands on our network. In the course of a comprehensive revision, we are currently optimizing the already fully redundant network. With the replacement of our border routers we successfully completed a first expansion step with which we were able to increase the capacity of our Internet connections significantly.

When projects grow beyond a single server, it usually makes sense to manage the required infrastructure automatically. After Libcloud and Ansible it is now also possible to use Terraform to define complete setups at cloudscale.ch "as code".

The buzzwords of the hour are containers, Docker, Kubernetes. Accordingly, in this guest article we are covering OpenShift – an open-source project based on those same technologies. In this article we would also like to show you that OpenShift is much more than just "Docker and Kubernetes" and give you a short introduction to OpenShift on cloudscale.ch:

After the official introduction of our S3-compatible Object Storage this summer, we are now showing you how to use this technology quickly and effectively in your projects. Furthermore, you will learn more about our attractive pricing scheme.

A few months ago, we introduced Floating IPs. These are particularly useful when it comes to increasing the availability. Using "Floating Networks", further exciting applications can now be covered:

After an extended beta phase, our S3-compatible Object Storage – one of the most popular feature requests from our users – is now officially available. After our last post about use cases and tools, we would like to give you a few insights into how we at cloudscale.ch get the most out of this technology:

Back in November 2016 we introduced our API, which allows you to manage your cloud servers automatically – directly from within your own application or deployment setup. With Ansible and Libcloud this just got even more comfortable: These two important open-source projects now support our API natively.

The entire infrastructure at cloudscale.ch has been designed for maximum availability of your virtual servers. By using Floating IPs you can now make your services highly available at the software level as well. Let us briefly explain:

Many customers value the high level of performance of our servers. Along with powerful processors and fast networking, our distributed SSD storage cluster contributes substantially to superior speed. After thorough testing in our lab, we recently gave it an extra performance boost:

We have always considered ourselves to be a platform from developers for developers: The requirements and requests of the developer community have a substantial influence on our roadmap. Thus, the latest feature, an S3-compatible object storage with data located in Switzerland exclusively, has also been implemented by popular request.

An old IT adage says that every company has a test environment. Yet some companies are in the fortunate position of having a separate production environment as well...
All joking aside, we firmly believe that we can only ensure reliable operations in production when using a separate test environment – and our customers will surely agree with us on this point. The topics in this brief review:

Many projects quickly grow into a set of several virtual servers: e.g. to separate "development", "staging" and "production" environments, to test new releases of a certain software or by deploying additional servers to handle load peaks. Thanks to our new API you can now include the deployment of new servers in your configuration management tool or task-specific scripts and thereby simplify and speed up your workflow.

May we introduce: Anti-Affinity. Use this small but powerful new feature to build even more resilient setups. Furthermore, we would like to share some insights in how we approach high availability (HA) on many different levels.

Many of our users care a lot about security. So do we! We are glad to introduce a whole bundle of new security features that we have rolled out over the last couple of days:

One of the key ingredients of a highly performing server is fast data access. This is why all of our virtual machines come with 10 GB of distributed SSD-only storage included. But what if your specific use case asks for lots of disk space rather than performance? That's where "Bulk Storage" comes into play.

As an IT professional, you are probably optimizing things constantly. So are we! We have released several enhancements that will help you to streamline your workflow:

You asked for it, here it is: cloudscale.ch now offers private networking. Interconnect your virtual servers in a more secure way using a dedicated interface separated from the public Internet. Let us quickly take you through the most relevant aspects of this new feature:

We are happy to announce that we are now offering native IPv6 support for all our cloud servers. By enabling IPv6 on your servers today, you can directly reach the rapidly growing number of IPv6 users around the world.

At cloudscale.ch, we have been using OpenStack ever since we started out in 2014. Recently, we upgraded from OpenStack "Kilo" to the newer "Liberty" release. It has been an interesting journey, and we would like to share some of our experiences with you:

Sometimes, fundamental improvements happen in the background and are therefore almost invisible to end users. We went through a full code change (including switching programming languages) over the last couple of months. A natural next step if you look at the broader context:

After developing, testing and launching our new cloud offering, we were facing a challenge that is typical for the stage we are in: growth. In our case, growing the team turned out to be trickier than anticipated. In this short update, we will cover:

After admitting more and more users onto our platform, we can start the new year with the most exciting announcement a start-up can probably make: