Posts by Jeremy Jarvis

Brightbox Cloud – general availability 3 Oct 11

Brightbox Cloud is now out of beta and now publically available!

See the blog post for full details…

It’s a new brand day! 27 Sep 11

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 ;)

Public launch of Brightbox Cloud

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.

Pricing for Brightbox Cloud (and last call for private beta) 19 Aug 11

In 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!

Brightbox Cloud Pricing

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

Cloud Servers are billed by the hour, depending on the “Server Type” which defines the RAM, disk size and CPU allocation of the server.

Load Balancers

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

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)

Data charges

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)

Any questions?

If you’ve got any questions about the pricing or anything else about the new cloud platform, drop us an email.

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!

Cloud Balancers now available in beta! 26 Jan 11

Today, we’re excited to announce Brightbox Cloud Balancers – our new distributed load balancing service which is available right now as part of the cloud beta programme.

Cloud Balancers make it effortless to add fault tolerance and horizontal scalability to your systems by distributing traffic across a pool of Cloud Servers – even within separate Zones.

• Scalable – Cloud Balancers use our high performance distributed cloud infrastructure
• Resilient – automate fault tolerance by balancing across Cloud Servers in separate Zones
• Flexible – map Cloud IP addresses onto your balancers
• Familiar – point domain names at your balancers using standard DNS A-records or CNAMEs
• Simple – use our intuitive commandline interface (or REST API) to configure balancers
• Fast – instantly reconfigure any aspect of your existing balancers
• Customisable – configure custom healthchecks for your pool of Cloud Servers
• Extendable – add as many HTTP or TCP listeners you need per balancer

If you’re already part of the cloud beta programme you’ll simply need to install the latest version of the CLI tool (0.10.1) and you’ll be able to create Cloud Balancers straightaway (see the documentation for instructions).

If you’re not on the beta programme and would like to be, why not submit a beta request today? :)

Check out the screencast…

Cloud Balancer Q & A

How does it work?

Cloud Balancers are managed via the Brightbox API (or using the CLI tool, which uses the API). You create a new balancer, specifying which services should be balanced and to which back end Cloud Servers. The Cloud Balancer is then automatically built, within a minute or so, on top of the Cloud Balancing layer which spans each Zone within a Region. You can then map a Cloud IP onto the balancer and traffic is distributed across your servers according to the policy you define (the default is “least connections”). The Cloud Servers are continuously monitored according to a “healthcheck” you specify. Should one of your Cloud Servers become unresponsive it is removed from the active pool of servers until it is “up” again.

How does this compare to Amazon’s ELB (Elastic Load Balancing)?

Brightbox Cloud Balancers offer a number of advantages over Amazon’s ELB – here’s a few important ones…

1. Brightbox Cloud Balancers work with Cloud IPs so you can easily map and remap public IP addresses between servers and load balancers.
2. With Amazon ELB you are restricted to using only CNAME dns records, so you can’t use root domains (e.g http://example.com) – whereas with Brightbox you can use A-records and use domain names however you wish.
3. With Brightbox you can instantly reconfigure any aspect of your existing balancers, whereas in some situations you’d need to recreate a new ELB load balancer from scratch.

How will pricing work?

We plan to announce pricing information on both this and other Brightbox Cloud services within the next month.

There will be a standard fixed hourly rate for each Cloud Balancer plus a charge for load balanced internet data (per GB).

How quickly are load balancers created?

Load Balancers are normally created and handling traffic within 90 seconds.

How much traffic will a Brightbox Cloud Balancer handle?

Exactly how much traffic a single balancer can handle depends largely on your application, but they can comfortably handle 6000 concurrent connections as standard. This will also increase dramatically in the near future as we add new scaling features to the Cloud Balancing layer.

What kind of traffic can we balance?

You can balance most TCP-based protocols. Specifying an HTTP listener adds an “X-Forwarded-For” header.

Libcloud Python driver for Brightbox Cloud API 30 Nov 10

Hot on the heel of last weeks announcement of support for our new cloud API in the Fog Ruby cloud library – some news for Pythonistas! We now also have a Brightbox driver for Libcloud – the Python (and now Java) client library for interacting with multiple cloud computing APIs.

The driver is available right now via our fork of libcloud on Github and will hopefully be merged into the official codebase soon.

Here’s a quick example using the Python shell…

libcloud-brightbox:trunk$ python
Python 2.6.5 (r265:79359, Mar 24 2010, 01:32:55)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5493)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from libcloud.drivers.brightbox import BrightboxNodeDriver
>>> from libcloud.types import NodeState
>>> driver = BrightboxNodeDriver('my_client_id', 'my_client_secret')
>>> len(driver.list_nodes())
3
>>> size = driver.list_sizes()[0]
>>> image = driver.list_images()[0]
>>> node = driver.create_node(name='Libcloud test server', size=size, image=image)
>>> node.id
'srv-0dj5y'
>>> len(driver.list_nodes())
4

If you’ve not already done so, request a free cloud beta account and have a go yourself :)

CloudCamp London – Tues 30 November 24 Nov 10

Next Tuesday, 30 November, John and I are heading down to the 10th CloudCamp London “unconference”, which is being held at the Novotel Hammersmith Hotel (6:30 PM to 9:30 PM).

We’ll also be around the “big smoke” earlier in the afternoon, so if you’d like to meet up for a drink and a chat drop us a line – we might even treat you to a live beta demo ;)

If you want to attend CloudCamp London too, register here and come say “hello”!

Support for new Brightbox Cloud API in Fog 17 Nov 10

The latest release of Fog (0.3.19) includes support for the new Brightbox Cloud API. Fog is a Ruby library which provides an “abstraction layer” for interacting with multiple cloud computing APIs.

Created by Wesley Beary and recently adopted into Engine Yard’s open source programme, Fog has a lot of momentum and is a great way to get started with provisioning resources across multiple cloud providers.

If you’ve not yet done so, request a Brightbox Cloud beta account to get started.

Announcing Brightbox Cloud – the UK’s first true IaaS platform! 9 Nov 10

Today, we’re announcing the private beta launch of Brightbox Cloud – our new IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) platform!

We’ve dedicated several months to developing and engineering our new cloud platform from the ground up (almost literally). We’ve kitted out two new datacentre “Zones”, set up a new resilient network across them and built-out a distributed cloud system which enables some very exciting features such as re-mappable cloud IP addresses, easy import/export of your cloud server images and much, much more.

We’re launching the private beta phase with our simple command-line client (a full control panel GUI will be available soon). Check out the screencast below to see how easy it is to get started.

If you’d like to get [free] access to our private beta programme, simply submit a request via the beta site and we’ll be in touch shortly!

I’m extremely proud of our achievement, Brightbox is the first company in the UK to offer a “true” distributed IaaS cloud – quite a shake-up for the European cloud market. Stay tuned – there’s a lot more in store!

New: Dedicated MySQL services 27 Aug 10

One of the many benefits of the Brightbox service is access to our shared MySQL clusters. The shared MySQL service enables a low barrier-to-entry and is perfect for many customers, but there are situations where something a little beefier is needed or something with more control. We’ve been running dedicated MySQL clusters for a long time now, but they’ve been something we usually only did for larger customers, alongside full gold support.

That has now changed! Today, we’re really pleased to announce two new dedicated MySQL options: a single dedicated MySQL server and a dedicated HA (High Availability) cluster.

Both services provide you with the benefits of increased performance and predictability with guaranteed CPU and RAM resources, and also include 24/7 monitoring and managed backups!

Pricing starts at just £85/month for a single dedicated MySQL instance and £169/month for the HA cluster – a bargain for what are essentially fully-managed MySQL solutions. They’re available to all customers to purchase from the control panel right now.

For more information, check out the dedicated MySQL services page on our main site.