Posts by Jeremy Jarvis

Important announcement: Multiple users and accounts release 11 Feb 10

We recently previewed some upcoming changes to how users interact with Brightbox accounts. This feature will be going live at 12:00 GMT on Weds 17 Feb and since it represents a change in behaviour for existing customers, I’ve summarised the details below.

Maintenance period

Starting at 12:00 (midday) on Weds 17 Feb, the Brightbox control panel will be unavailable for approximately 20 minutes whilst we perform the updates. One of the updates will include a migration to create an owner user account (name and email address) for all existing active customer accounts.

Change of login from “username” to email address

Once the above maintenance period is completed, you’ll be able to login to the control panel again as normal, but now using your registered email address to login, together with the existing password.

Adding and inviting users

Once logged in you’ll be able to give other people access to your account via the “User access” link.

It’s important to note that initially, as described below, all users that you give access to your account will have full access (apart from the ability to invite other users).

Interim billing and technical roles

Currently, customers are able to specify two additional “contacts” on their account – a billing contact (receives cc’ed payment email notifications) and a technical contact (receives copies of support ticket notifications and server notifications). These “old style” contacts do not have access to the account, unless the account owner supplies them with the account username and password.

The main purpose of this work is to enable a “many to many” relationship between users and accounts i.e multiple users can access a single account and single users can have multiple accounts. We will be introducing a more extensive permissions system into the control panel in due course, but in the meantime the four “roles” that users can have will each have full access to the account but differ in their behaviour…

• Owner (one per account): Full access + add/invite new users to have access. The owner role is the person ultimately responsible for the account and can’t be assigned by users.
• Primary technical (one per account): Full access + single point of contact for Brightbox technical support to receive email notifications etc
• Technical (many per account): Full access.
• Billing (many per account): Full access + receive copies of payment email notifications

If you have any questions about these changes and how they will affect you, please drop us an email.

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.

New: Performance graphs (beta) 8 Dec 09

We quietly rolled out a new feature into the Brightbox control panel a couple of weeks ago, adding performance graphs for each of your Brightbox virtual machines. To view graphs for a virtual machine, click the “full details” link from the overview screen. You can currently choose to view CPU, disk i/o, public and private network usage for the last hour, day, week and month.

The graphing service is currently in beta, so you might find some occasional gaps in data for the time being, but over time this should prove a very useful feature.

Brightbox sponsors LRUG (London Ruby User Group) 25 Aug 09

Together with our friends at Eden Development, Unboxed Consulting and Skills Matter, Brightbox will be sponsoring LRUG events for the next few months.

The next event, on Wednesday 9th September at The Crypt in Clerkenwell, will be a Coding Dojo which sounds like fun! Don’t forget to register as early as you can if you’re going.

New Relic RPM now included on Brightbox 512 and above 20 Aug 09

FiveRuns announced last week that they would be ceasing the Manage service from 25th August. We have partnered with FiveRuns since December 2007 to bundle the Manage service with Brightbox products so we were sad to learn of its end-of-life.

However, we have been working hard over the last week to find an alternative solution and I’m very pleased to announce that we’ve agreed a partnership with New Relic to include their Bronze RPM monitoring service with all Brightbox 512 products and above.

New Relic RPM allows you to monitor 24×7, detect problems in real-time, drill down to find the causes and continuously tune your Rails applications for high performance.

Request your account

We hope to integrate our control panel with the New Relic APIs, but for now to get your free Bronze account:

1. Create a New Relic free (Lite) account, making a note of your account name, then…
2. Submit a Brightbox support ticket, including your New Relic account name, to request your free upgrade to Bronze RPM.

New Relic have an excellent Knowledge Base which includes instructions for installing the monitoring agent into your Rails applications and much more.

Brightbox sponsors Rails Underground and Rails Camp UK 17 Jul 09

We’re very happy to be sponsoring two completely different but equally exciting Rails events – Rails Underground, the London Rails conference and Rails Camp UK in Margate.

Rails Underground takes place 24-25th July in London at the Royal National Hotel and features many of the famous faces of the Rails world and a few new ones too. I understand there are a handful of tickets still available, but you’ll probably have to be quick!

Rails Camp UK, organised by a Brightbox customer (the enigmatic “Mr Jaba”), will be taking place at Margate Youth Hostel on 16-19th October. Rails Camps are, according to the site…

a posse of like-minded ruby hackers on a country retreat with zero internet for a weekend of fun. You’ll laugh, hack, learn, cry (well, you probably won’t cry… but you know… it felt poetic) and most likely play a crap-load of guitar hero.

As always, there’ll be plenty of our famous T-shirts at both events :)

Say “hello” to George Hills 16 Jul 09

All of us at Brightbox towers are very pleased to welcome George Hills to the team.

George, who joined us earlier this week, is an experienced Senior Systems Administrator and a networking expert.  He will be working within our Operations team to both manage our existing hosting infrastructure and develop our new “cloud” systems.

Welcome on board George!

New: reboots and additional VM info in control panel 1 Jul 09

A few days ago we deployed some improvements to our control panel, enabling tighter integration with our backend infrastructure. For the technically minded (or remotely interested) we’re using the magic of AMQP/RabbitMQ to enable this integration and we’ll be using this system to do more over the coming months.

The first fruits of this integration include the ability to initiate a reboot of any of your Brightbox virtual machines and enable you to view more information on the underlying physical host server and storage device.

You can now reboot any of your virtual machines via the control panel by simply clicking the “reboot” link and specifying either a “soft” or “hard” reboot. A soft reboot is the equivalent of running the shutdown -r command within the OS, whereas a hard reboot is equivalent to cutting power. In most cases, if you want to reboot your virtual machine you’ll want to try the soft option first to avoid the risk of filesystem corruption.

The additional virtual machine information is available by clicking the “full details” link next to one of your products. You’ll now see an additional two rows of information, “Host server” and “Storage”, which will now enable customers to make more sense of our status messages when, for example, we need to do some planned maintenance on a particular host server.

We’re constantly working on improving our control panel and we hope these two items are useful to customers, more improvements to follow soon :)

New: 4GB Brightbox PLUS increased CPU on 1GB and above! 19 Jun 09

A few days ago we added a new 4GB Brightbox product to our virtual machine range. Several customers have had 4GB boxes for a while now (on special request :) – but they’re now available for anyone. The 4GB Brightbox comes with burstable dual CPU, 50GB SAN storage, 25 MySQL cluster connections and 1.6TB/month data transfer!

We’ve also changed the CPU allocation for Brightbox 1GB and 2GB products so that they now also benefit from being able to burst to 2 CPU cores – effectively doubling CPU for both products!

Previously, the Brightbox 2GB product had a single “dedicated” core but having spent some time reviewing usage stats it was clear that CPU is considerably under utilised across all of our host machines so we could be confident that no existing customers would actually lose out by this change. If you currently have a 1GB or 2GB Brightbox and want to upgrade to the new CPU allocations, raise a support ticket and we’ll arrange the config change and reboot.