Archive: posts from May 2009

Is it JRuby? 29 May 09

Carl Mercier has forked our “Is it Ruby 1.9” web app to make “Is it JRuby“, to track which gems work with JRuby. This is how free software is supposed to work!

For those of you not in the know, JRuby is a Java implementation of Ruby, allowing you to run Ruby code on a Java Runtime Environment.  If you’re using or playing with JRuby, head over to isitjruby.com with your feedback.

Carl’s Github project is here and our original is here.

New: Brightbox CDN (Content Delivery Network) service 26 May 09

I’m pleased to announce we’ve partnered with CDNetworks, a global leader in CDN technologies, to provide the new Brightbox CDN service – another significant addition to the Brightbox service portfolio.

The Brightbox CDN service works by seamlessly delivering static content (e.g images, css and javascript) to website visitors from a high performance “edge” cache server nearest to their geographic location.

The network of global cache servers consists of 45 Points of Presence (POPs) located in 23 cities, with multiple nodes at each POP – speeding up the serving of assets to a truly global audience.

Brightbox CDN integrates very easily with Rails’ built-in asset helpers. In most cases, customers will need to add just one line to their production environment config:

ActionController::Base.asset_host = "http://assets%d.<appname>.brightcdn.com"

Pricing is per GB, and customers can choose between two simple billing methods, either pay-as-you-go (no contract) or opt for a 12 month commit with significant volume discounts.

For more information, check out the Brightbox CDN service page on our main website. If you have further questions, please get in touch and we’ll be happy to help.

New: Load Balancing service 20 May 09

Today, I’m pleased to announce the launch of our new Load Balancing service – which enables customers to distribute requests across multiple Brightbox virtual machines with ease.

It’s always been possible to create virtual load balancers from standard Brightboxes, but our new service now provides a simpler, more reliable and cost effective solution.

How it works

1. We provide you with a new Load Balanced IP address (which resides on our load balancers), which you configure your domain to resolve to.
2. Our load balancers distribute requests across your pool of healthy Brightbox servers.
3. Health checks are performed every few seconds on each of your Brightboxes. Should one of your Brightboxes becomes unavailable, it is taken out of the load balancing pool until it is available again.

Pricing for the load balancing service starts at only £19/month!  To get started, simply request the load balancing service from Extra Services in your Brightbox account.

If you have any questions on the service, please get in touch.

Join the Brightbox team! 12 May 09

Brightbox is looking for two new people to join the systems team, a Senior Linux Systems Administrator and a Linux/Rails System Support person. Both roles are full-time and you can work from home, from our office in Leeds, or a bit of both.

Send a hello, a CV and salary expectations to jobs at the Brightbox UK domain. CVs should be in an open format, preferably PDF or plain text. Closing date is 31^st May 2009.

As always, recruitment agents should e-mail our special recruitment company email address: root@localhost

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Passenger 2.2.2 packages for Ubuntu 1 May 09

Passenger 2.2.2 was released a few days ago and we now have a package available for Ubuntu Hardy.  After a lot of testing, we’re also happy with the recent packaging changes so this is going straight to our stable repository.

This new version of Passenger brings a train-load of NGINX fixes, so our Passenger enabled nginx-brightbox package has been updated too and is available in our testing repository.  More details on using our testing repository here in the 2.2.1 announcement blog post.