Archive: posts from January 2010

MySQL slow query improvements 28 Jan 10

We’ve just pushed some updates to the MySQL slow query warning interface in the Brightbox control panel, which includes two main improvements.

Firstly, where the same (or very similar) query occurs more than once, they are aggregated together rather than being recorded as individual slow queries. The user interface displays the count so you can see exactly how many times this slow query occurred in the last 7 days.

Secondly, the full SQL query is now displayed, so customers now have more information with which to optimise their applications.

Brightbox Gem v2.3.6 released 27 Jan 10

Today I’m pleased to announce a new revision of the Brightbox Deployment Gem, version 2.3.6. This release fixes some of the issues reported to us by our users, along with a few extra features.

The documentation on the wiki has been updated with the new fixes and features. If you have any tips or find any errors just let us know.

NEW FEATURES

Apt Package Dependencies

Just as you can currently define gems your application relies on and have them automatically installed onto your servers, you can now do the same with apt packages. Define them in your deploy.rb and they’ll be installed before installing your required rubygems, which means you can use it to install apt packages that gems depend on. As an example, the nokogiri gem depends on a couple of apt packages.

depend :remote, :apt, "libxml2-dev"
depend :remote, :apt, "libxslt1-dev"
depend :remote, :gem, "nokogiri", ">= 0"

Intermediate SSL Certificates

Support for Intermediate SSL Certificates in Apache has been added, meaning you no longer need to manually edit the Apache config files directly. Just add one line to your deploy.rb and the gem now takes care of updating the Apache config for you. An example SSL configuration:

set :ssl_certificate, "my_cert.pem"
set :ssl_key, "my_cert.key"
set :ssl_intermediate, "intermediate.crt"

See the wiki page for Adding SSL Support to Apache for more information.

Deploy.local.rb

A common issue we’ve seen with is setting the deploy password. If you put it in deploy.rb, then it inevitably ends up in your source control repository, which is a bad idea. A workaround we’ve suggested in the past is to have a deploy.local.rb file, which isn’t tracked by source control, and load that from within your deploy.rb file. This allows you to have the password (or any other sensitive settings) defined, but kept outside your source control.

As part of this release, the gem now has official support for a deploy.local.rb file. If it exists, the gem will load it in for you.

For more information see the Advanced Gem Settings page on the wiki.

Disable (re)generating webserver config

If you’ve made manual changes to your webserver (apache or nginx) configuration, then you don’t want an accidental deploy:setup to overwrite your configs. Up until now you just had to avoid running the command, but now there’s a setting to disable it for you.

set :generate_webserver_config, false

FIXES AND ENHANCEMENTS

• Max Age setting now accepts a number as well as a string
• deploy:initial reloads Apache so the new config is loaded

New: announcing the Brightbox SLA 26 Jan 10

Over the last few months, we’ve been seeing increasing number of requests about our SLA (Service Level Agreement) – do we have one? if not then why not? and so on.

We’ve been reasonably resistant to publishing an SLA until now, not because of doubts over our infrastructure or ability to deliver, but because of the minimal value we felt it would add for customers in the event of actual downtime. We’re a pragmatic bunch at Brightbox and like to avoid adding things just for the sake of it or “because everyone else does” :)

However, and it’s a pretty big “however”, we understand that for many people an SLA or “uptime guarantee” is a useful gauge of whether a provider is actually willing to “put their money where their mouth is” and make a financial commitment to meeting a specific minimum target.

So, I’m pleased to announce that from 1 Jan 2010 (backdated) Brightbox offers a 99.95% SLA on virtual machine and load balancing products (see Terms and Conditions for details). We’ll likely expand the SLA soon to also cover our MySQL products and other products currently in the pipeline, but we’ll need a different method of assessing “availability” for these products.

Preview: Multiple users and accounts 15 Jan 10

Right now, each Brightbox customer has a single username/password to access their Brightbox account. For many smaller customers, this works fine and they can easily operate the various aspects of their account themselves e.g manage virtual machines, billing and support tickets. However, there are also a number of scenarios where this doesn’t work too well – especially when there are multiple people managing one or more accounts.

We’ve been developing a more robust solution for users and accounts for some time and hope to launch this new system in the next few weeks. In this post, I’d like to give a sneak preview on the forthcoming changes…

• Each person will have a Brightbox user account
• We’ll be introducing a number of “roles” (tbc)
• Each account will always have an “owner” contact, this person is ultimately responsible for the account
• Existing Brightbox account holders will be migrated to a new owner contact
• The account owner will be able to invite additional users to their account
• The control panel will enable users with access to multiple accounts to easily move between the accounts to which they have access

Over the next couple of weeks, all customers will receive an email explaining the changes and the migration process.

Passenger 2.2.9 packages for Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy 8 Jan 10

The Phusion team released Passenger 2.2.9 today, which adds support for Rails 3, the GEM bundler, and fixes a couple of bugs.  As usual Brightbox are providing Ubuntu Hardy packages for i386 and AMD64 architectures, available now from the Brightbox apt repository.

This package won’t actually support Rails 3 just yet though as we’ve yet to package and test the librack 1.1.0, which Rails 3 depends on.  We’re working on it now and once we’re happy with it we’ll add new packages to our repository as usual.

Brightbox sponsors NWRUG, 21st January, Manchester 7 Jan 10

I’m speaking at this month’s North West Ruby Group meeting about some of the tools available that can be used to solve common Ruby and Rails deployment and development problems. “UNIX: Rediscovering the wheel”.

Brightbox is also sponsoring the meeting so there will be free pizza afterwards (free as in pizza, not as in speech).

More details on the NWRUG blog page.

Hope to see you there!