We’ve just released a new version of the Brightbox deployment gem. The gem has supported bundler for a long time, but now calls to rake tasks use bundler too (if the app is bundler enabled of course). This solves the problem some people were having where the right gems weren’t available during rake execution, or rake itself complained about a rake version mismatch.
We’ve built Ubuntu packages for the latest release of Phusion Passenger, 3.0.11. They’re available now on our apt repository and our Launchpad ppa. Instructions on how to get set up are on our wiki as usual.
Updated NGINX Passenger packages will follow shortly (they’ll be available via a separate ppa)
Brightbox Cloud is now out of beta and now publically available!
See the blog post for full details…
It’s been almost 4 years since we started Brightbox, and our little hand drawn box logo has worked hard and served us well over this time – brightly adorning the chest of many a well-dressed ruby developer!
However, we felt that as we launch Brightbox Cloud and continue to grow, it was time for a review of our brand identity.
We collaborated with the awesome guys at Fudge Studios and PJD to develop the new identity which conveys more clearly what we consider are the distinguishing characteristics of Brightbox as a company: “clarity”, “openness” and “transparency”. Also, we like the colours ;)
I’m happy to announce that the official launch of Brightbox Cloud will be on 3rd October 2011 (less than a week to go!), and the new website is now live.
Also, as you can see at the top of the page here, we’ve relabelled our established Ruby hosting service to “Brightbox Ruby”, to distinguish it from Brightbox Cloud.
Oh, and yes, there will be t-shirts.
A bug in the Apache webserver has recently been widely publicised. The bug is very simple to trigger remotely and causes almost-instant memory exhaustion (OOM) on the targeted server, which causes any sites hosted there to be unavailable until the server is restarted.
mitre.org has links to more information about this bug.
Ubuntu released new versions of the Apache packages last night, which contain a fix for this bug.
We recommend that customers who are using Apache on their Brightboxes, should upgrade as soon as reasonably convenient. The default Brightbox install uses Apache, so if you are unsure whether or not this affects you then you should upgrade Apache using the instructions below.
The upgrade requires a restart of Apache, which will momentarily interrupt service. In cases where your Brightboxes are behind a load-balancer, the impact of this is minimal.
We believe the upgrade to be low-risk; we have already upgraded a large number of our own servers today without incident, and the only changes relative to the previous package are this security fix.
The necessary commands are
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install apache2.2-commonIn preparation for the official launch (more on that to follow soon), we’re announcing the close of the private beta phase of Brightbox Cloud.
We’ve had around 750 beta testers taking part in the private beta programme and we’re grateful to all those who submitted bugs, provided feature requests, and gave both postive and negative feedback. We’re also grateful to those who built web crawlers, TOR exit nodes etc and generally gave things a good hammering :)
Private beta testers get free cloud resources to play with as well as a 50% discount for the first 3 months when we “go public”. We’ll be closing private beta registration on 25 August 2011 so this is the final call: sign up for the private beta before it’s too late!
Now, the bit we’ve all been waiting for… I’m excited to announce provisional pricing for our new cloud offering.
Brightbox Cloud is a metered service, with resources charged by the hour or by the gigabyte. These new prices do not affect our existing unmetered Rails hosting platform – Brightbox Cloud is a completely separate platform.
Cloud Servers are billed by the hour, depending on the “Server Type” which defines the RAM, disk size and CPU allocation of the server.
| Server Type | RAM (MB) | Disk (GB) | CPU cores | Price per hour |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nano | 512 | 20 | 2 | £0.025 |
| Mini | 1024 | 40 | 4 | £0.05 |
| Small | 2048 | 80 | 4 | £0.10 |
| Medium | 4096 | 160 | 8 | £0.20 |
| Large | 8192 | 320 | 8 | £0.40 |
Load Balancers are billed by the hour. Internet data in and out of Load Balancers is billed at the normal price. Each Load Balancer is highly available within a Region – designed to tolerate the loss of an entire Zone. Each Load Balancer supports multiple protocols and, at present, can handle 6000 concurrent connections (additional scaling options will be available soon to handle higher levels of traffic).
Price per load balancer instance (HA) = £0.04/hour
Cloud IPs are instantly re-mappable public IP addresses which can be mapped to any Cloud Server or Load Balancer within a Region. Each Cloud IP allocated to your account is billed by the hour. Cloud IPs can be allocated and released from your account at any time.
Price per Cloud IP allocated to account = £0.0035/hour (Free until 1 October)
Internet data is billed by the gigabyte. Usage data is collected every minute by our billing system. Local data transfer, i.e. data transferred within the same Zone, is free-of-charge. Regional data, i.e data transferred between separate Zones, is free-of-charge until 1 Dec 2011.
Internet data (inbound) = £0.08 per GB
Internet data (outbound) = £0.12 per GB
Regional data transfer = £0.01 tbc (Free until 1 Dec 2011)
If you’ve got any questions about the pricing or anything else about the new cloud platform, drop us an email.
We’ve built Ubuntu packages for the latest release of Passenger, 3.0.8. They’re available now on our apt repository and our Launchpad ppa. Instructions on how to get set up are on our wiki as usual.
Updated NGINX Passenger packages will follow shortly (they’ll be available via a separate ppa)
We’ve updated our NGINX packages to NGINX v1.0.0 and Passenger 3.0.7. They’re now hosted on Launchpad.net, which makes it dead easy to use in Ubuntu.
We’ve also fixed the dependency problems that occurred in the past, where a newer version of Passenger broke the older NGINX packages. These NGINX packages now strictly depend on the Passenger packages, and we’ve put them in their own Launchpad archive so they’re always guaranteed to work (even if they ever lag behind the Apache packages).
You can add the PPA and install NGINX like this:
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:brightbox/passenger-nginx
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nginx-full
You’ll then need to enable the Passenger module, which can be usually done like this:
cat <<EOF > /etc/nginx/conf.d/passenger.conf
passenger_root /usr/lib/phusion-passenger;
EOFWe’ve also added our other Apache Passenger packages to Launchpad too (with Hardy support), just use:
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:brightbox/passengerWe’ll keep our own apt repository in sync with Launchpad for Hardy and Lucid too, in case you prefer that (use the passenger-nginx component for the nginx passenger packages).
Happy Passengering! (I’m pretty certain that’s not a real verb. It might be a proper verb. I’m pretty certain there is no such thing as a proper verb).
I don’t have to tell you why IPv6 is important – even the mainstream media has finally realised that the pool of IPv4 addresses is exhausted (it’s not like we needed tarot cards to predict it!). Any modern network must have support for IPv6.
We’ve been concentrating on perfecting IPv4 in Brightbox Cloud as that’s the immediate need, but we’ve considered IPv6 since day one of our network designs (over a year ago now!). Every cloud server will get IPv6 addresses by default (and AAAA dns records of course), so you’ll be able to access your servers directly. We already have this working for our own test servers and we’ll have it in the hands of our customers very soon.
IPv6 will be a “first class citizen” in the Brightbox Cloud – supported throughout all of our services: Our Cloud Servers, Load Balancers, Firewall, Cloud IPs and of course our API. We’re currently working on the full implementation but I thought it was worthwhile announcing our plans, since this is such an important aspect of our service.
In the three and a half years since Brightbox started, we’ve built a solid reputation for our “Serious Rails Hosting” platform. We’ve spent the last twelve months building Brightbox Cloud our new cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service which is already making big waves. We’re now looking for an experienced software engineer to join our small but highly productive development team. This is an awesome opportunity to use your skills and experience to help shape our future products and direction in this exciting and fast growing industry.
You have an insatiable desire to understand things, to break them apart and to fix them. You are continuously looking for ways to improve things. You are enthusiastic about some technologies and vocalise your reasoned dislike for others. You have strong opinions and stand by them when it really matters, but are willing to compromise when it doesn’t. You are able to communicate your ideas succinctly with eloquence and clarity. You have probably contributed to some free software projects, and perhaps started your own. You don’t take yourself too seriously and are comfortable with others reviewing your work. You love what you do.
We’re Ruby developers and system engineers. We’re obsessive about great user experience and clear documentation. We’re passionate about high availability, performance and consistency, though not all at once. We’ve coded seriously in Ruby, C, Delphi, Ada, C++, Python, Amiga AMOS, PHP, Java, Objective-C, Pascal, Eiffel, Basic, Perl, Informix 4GL, Javascript and Bash. We use Ubuntu, Centos and OS X. We take our work seriously but we have a lot of fun.
Like our systems, our teams are geographically distributed, communicating in real-time throughout the working day using our private Jabber conference or phone calls. We manage our work with Redmine, usually organising chunks of work into weekly sprints. We’re a lean organisation – you’ll have direct access to leadership as well as other teams. Our development, engineering and operations teams all work closely together which shortens the feedback loop and means we get things done better.
Remote, but ideally working within 2 hours of UTC.
circa £55k p.a. (depending on experience).
Friday 22nd April 2011.
Send a hello email and a CV (PDF or plain text) to jobs@brightbox.co.uk. All correspondence from recruitment agents must be in Esperanto and to our special recruitment email address: root@localhost