Tech insights and news. Best served hot.
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.
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.
First things first: Please bookmark our new status page https://cloudscale-status.net right now in order to have access to the latest maintenance announcements and status information at any time.
Back in January we already summarized information about the measures taken so far regarding the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. With this update we would like to inform you that we have already applied the available fixes for Meltdown and Spectre (on 2018-01-10 and 2018-02-26 respectively) on all of our compute nodes.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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: General availability of our Swiss public cloud.
More news. Further insights.
Try it yourself and launch a Swiss Linux server today!