New: Dedicated MySQL services 27 Aug 10

One of the many benefits of the Brightbox service is access to our shared MySQL clusters. The shared MySQL service enables a low barrier-to-entry and is perfect for many customers, but there are situations where something a little beefier is needed or something with more control. We’ve been running dedicated MySQL clusters for a long time now, but they’ve been something we usually only did for larger customers, alongside full gold support.

That has now changed! Today, we’re really pleased to announce two new dedicated MySQL options: a single dedicated MySQL server and a dedicated HA (High Availability) cluster.

Both services provide you with the benefits of increased performance and predictability with guaranteed CPU and RAM resources, and also include 24/7 monitoring and managed backups!

Pricing starts at just £85/month for a single dedicated MySQL instance and £169/month for the HA cluster – a bargain for what are essentially fully-managed MySQL solutions. They’re available to all customers to purchase from the control panel right now.

For more information, check out the dedicated MySQL services page on our main site.

Ruby Enterprise 1.8.7-2010.02 Packages for Ubuntu Hardy & Lucid 16 Jun 10

We’ve built new 32 & 64bit Ruby Enterprise 1.8.7-2010.02 packages for Ubuntu Hardy and Lucid. The 2010.02 release of Ruby EE includes a number of backported fixes for critical bugs in Ruby 1.8.7p249 and we recommend users currently using our 2010.01 packages upgrade immediately.

For further information on using these packages see the release announcement for our Ruby EE 2010.01 packages.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS “Lucid” now available 8 Jun 10

Available from today, you can now choose either Ubuntu Hardy or Lucid as the base OS when building new Brightboxes.

Ubuntu Lucid is the latest Long Term Support (LTS) version of Ubuntu with security fixes provided until April 2015. It brings a whole bunch of upgrades such as Ruby 1.8.7, Monit 5, Apache 2.2.14 and new packages like CouchDB, Sphinx, Chef, RabbitMQ, MongoDB, ejabberd and many more.

We’ve treated it to the usual Brightbox Ruby deployment tune-up, including our Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.7-2010.01 packages. Updated Phusion Passenger packages are now available on our newly Lucid-enabled apt repository.

When buying a new Brightbox, you’ll see a combo box that you can use to select Lucid (Hardy is still currently the default). Upgrading from Hardy to Lucid isn’t really viable due to the way Hardy boxes handle kernels, so you’ll either need to request a re-image (which involves wiping your box, so make backups!) or buy a new box and move your apps to it.

New: Automatically add SSH keys to new Brightboxes 3 Jun 10

Getting access to your newly purchased Brightboxes used to require a trip to the control panel to retrieve the ‘rails’ user password. If you’re using config management systems like Chef or Puppet this is likely the only laborious aspects of configuring your box. No longer!

Now, whenever a new box is deployed, the SSH keys of all the technical contacts on your Brightbox account are automatically pre-installed for the default ‘rails’ user. To add your own SSH key, edit your user profile within the control panel and paste in your SSH public key using the editor at the bottom.

Remember, this only affects newly provisioned boxes – as the it’s done during the box build stage. Removing or adding technical contacts in the control panel at a later date will not automatically change any access control on existing boxes.

Ruby Enterprise 1.8.7-2010.01 Packages for Ubuntu Hardy & Lucid 17 May 10

We’ve built  new 32bit and 64bit Ruby Enterprise 1.8.7-2010.01 packages for Ubuntu Hardy and Lucid. The new packages are now the default on new Lucid beta boxes. For Hardy, as before these packages are quite a major change from the default Hardy Ruby interpreter,which is 1.8.6, so we recommend you test thoroughly before putting it into production.

As with our other Ruby EE packages, they upgrade (i.e replace) the standard 1.8 Ruby installation. This means all your gems stay the same, and everything on your system immediately starts using them (Phusion’s own Ubuntu packages do not work like this).

These packages are also the best way to get Ruby 1.8.7 on Hardy, which you’ll need if you’re playing with Rails 3.

If you’re on a Hardy based Brightbox, just create or edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox-rubyee.list to contain the rubyee-testing component like so:

deb http://apt.brightbox.net/ hardy rubyee-testing

If you’re on one of our Lucid beta boxes provisioned before today, simply create /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox-rubyee.list and add the rubyee component:

deb http://apt.brightbox.net/ lucid rubyee

Finally, update and upgrade libruby1.8:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libruby1.8 irb1.8 libopenssl-ruby1.8 libreadline-ruby1.8 rdoc1.8 ruby1.8

If you’re not on a Brightbox, see the instructions on our wiki first. The wiki also documents how to revert back to the old packages.

Ubuntu Lucid beta box offer 15 Apr 10

With the impending launch of Ubuntu “Lucid” (10.04 LTS), we are preparing our new Lucid-based Brightboxes.

We’ll still be offering Hardy-based Brightboxes, of course.

We’re now looking for volunteers beta test Lucid Brightboxes. If you’d like one to test, please email lucidbeta@brightbox.co.uk.

Beta test Brightboxes are free, but Lucid isn’t finished and there are still bugs, so you shouldn’t plan on running your live customer-facing sites on one yet. Once we launch Lucid-based boxes for all, we’ll be switching off the beta boxes.

Space on the test platform is limited, so don’t delay! There are Brightbox-goodies on offer for the best bug reports. We’ll be giving priority to existing Brightbox customers.

Load Balancing with Stomp and ActiveMessaging 14 Apr 10

Inevitably with modern distributed software architecture you’re going to end up talking to a message queue at some point. We’ve been using ActiveMQ as the message broker, STOMP as the message protocol of choice and the ActiveMessaging gem so that we can talk to the message broker from Rails.

ActiveMessaging is a great piece of code, but at first glance it appears to have a couple of wrinkles

• The standard configuration doesn’t support load balancing (so that you can talk to another broker if your normal one isn’t responding).
• The queues and topics you want to speak to are defined at class level – which is a problem if you want the queues to be dynamically defined based upon data values.

But thanks to Ruby, YAML and a bit of lateral thinking you can get around these issues.

ActiveMessaging uses the Stomp Gem under the hood, and that can do load balancing by itself. So all you have to do is get ActiveMessaging to pass the relevant incantations down to the Stomp Gem – intact. And you do that with a bit of fancy YAML. The trick is to add your host configurations to the login configuration entry in hash format like this:

 production:
    adapter: stomp
    login:
      :randomize: true
      :hosts:
      - :login: myloginid1
        :passcode: mypassword1
        :host: broker-host-1.somedomain.co.uk
      - :login: myloginid2
        :passcode: mypassword2
        :host: broker-host-2.somedomain.co.uk

The Stomp Connection class checks login to see if it is a hash and if it is uses that in preference to anything else. You can setup anything Stomp understands within that Hash. Check the class code for details.

The beauty of this approach is that it is entirely in the configuration. Your Rails code doesn’t need to know about it. The reconnection happens automatically in the background.

I’ve used an observer class within Rails to handle the message sending. It watches a model and sends messages when stuff is created and updated – nicely separating the concerns. But I wanted to talk to different queues depending upon what was in the model. So the standard ActiveMessaging::MessageSender approach didn’t seem appropriate.

After a bit of digging around it turns out that you can get hold of the broker connection directly rather than going via the Gateway.

client = ActiveMessaging::Gateway.connection

Then you can send to any queue you like, not just the ones defined up front in messaging.rb:

client.send("/queue/#{some_variable}", body, headers)

This is a lower level connection and you lose the filter chains and some error checking. However if you need it, it’s there.

Timezones on your Brightbox 6 Apr 10

You may have thought the time is wrong on your server. Well, it isn’t really, it is just that we prefer to set the default time on Brightboxes to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

This is generally considered to be best practice where ever a server is geographically located, however, it may  cause a problem if you are hosting a  geographically specific web application.

If your web application requires a different time-zone such as CET, BST or PST, or Daylight Saving Time is giving you a headache,  take a look at our Wiki page for a timely introduction to the subject of time-zones on Brightboxes.

Brightbox sponsor the Scottish Ruby Conference 2010 23 Mar 10

After having such a good time at last year’s event, Team Brightbox is heading to Edinburgh again later this week for the Scottish Ruby Conference.

Again, we’re sponsoring the event and have provided hosting for the website. Our technical director John Leach is also speaking at the conference – his talk “UNIX: Rediscovering the wheel” will take place in the Great Hall on Friday afternoon.

John, Jeremy & Caius will all be attending the conference so make sure you say hi – and grab one of our always popular t-shirts too!

Passenger 2.2.11 packages for Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy 5 Mar 10

The last Passenger release, 2.2.10, has a bug that causes Apache to freeze when used under moderate load (Phusion say high load but we’ve seen it on quite moderate conditions).  We recommend that anyone using Passenger 2.2.10 upgrade to 2.2.11 asap.  Ubuntu Hardy packages are now available in our repository.