Archive: posts from March 2011

IPv6 in the Brightbox Cloud 25 Mar 11

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.

Wanted: Senior Ruby Software Engineer 18 Mar 11

Job description:

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.

Main responsibilities:

• Lead development of our distributed cloud management and automation systems
• Break down complex projects into clear tasks and specs
• Proactively find ways of improving our services, systems and code
• Efficiently manage your own workload as well as that of others
• Extract code to be released as free software projects

The ideal candidate:

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.

Skills & Experience:

• Several years experience of coding in Ruby
• Experience with Ruby web frameworks, such as Rails, Sinatra
• Experience of testing frameworks, such as rspec
• Experience of deployment using tools, such as Capistrano
• In-depth knowledge of distributed cloud infrastructure concepts
• Experience programming asynchronous systems
• Experience consuming and creating APIs
• Experience of working in a fast-paced, agile environment
• Ability to empathise with users

Our team:

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.

Location:

Remote, but ideally working within 2 hours of UTC.

Salary:

circa £55k p.a. (depending on experience).

Closing date:

Friday 22nd April 2011.

How to apply:

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

New: web-based console for Brightbox Cloud Servers 2 Mar 11

There are occasions when it’s very useful to see what a Cloud Server is outputting to screen, for example, while troubleshooting boot issues or when building new cloud images.

I’m pleased to announce today the new web-based console facility for Brightbox Cloud beta. The console requires no special client, plugins or applets – only a reasonably modern browser that supports HTML5 “Canvas” such as Safari 5.0 (mac/win), Chrome (linux/mac/win), Firefox 3 (linux/mac/win).

The web-based console lets you connect securely to your servers with a time-limited token (avoiding the potential security risk of  leaving a permanent vnc server exposed, for example).

How does it work?

Firstly, get the latest version of the cli (version 0.11.2) by running gem install bbcloud or apt-get install bbcloud (see documentation for more info on installation).

Simply issue the activate_console command for the relevant server…

Note: this will work straightaway for newly created servers, for older servers you’ll need to restart them by issuing a shutdown followed by a start command to pick up the new console facility.

The API will return the secure console url and a token, which is valid for 15 minutes, after which time you’ll simply need to reissue the activate_console command to receive a new token.

Once you’re connected the console sessions themselves can last much longer of course, tokens are only used to initiate the session. Should you need to connect again later, simply reissue the activate_console command to receive a new token.

Copy and paste the console url into your browser, enter the token and you’ll be able to view whatever is currently being output to screen by your cloud server!

When you’ve finished, simply close your browser window and the console session will expire.

If you’ve not done so yet, sign up for our cloud beta now!