See the blog post for full details…

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.

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.

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 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.

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 :)

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”!

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.

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!

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.

Available from today, you can now choose either Ubuntu Hardy or Lucid as the base OS when building new Brightboxes.

Ubuntu Lucid is the latest Long Term Support (LTS) version of Ubuntu with security fixes provided until April 2015. It brings a whole bunch of upgrades such as Ruby 1.8.7, Monit 5, Apache 2.2.14 and new packages like CouchDB, Sphinx, Chef, RabbitMQ, MongoDB, ejabberd and many more.

We’ve treated it to the usual Brightbox Ruby deployment tune-up, including our Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.7-2010.01 packages. Updated Phusion Passenger packages are now available on our newly Lucid-enabled apt repository.

When buying a new Brightbox, you’ll see a combo box that you can use to select Lucid (Hardy is still currently the default). Upgrading from Hardy to Lucid isn’t really viable due to the way Hardy boxes handle kernels, so you’ll either need to request a re-image (which involves wiping your box, so make backups!) or buy a new box and move your apps to it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, and email address used for registering then…
2. Submit a Brightbox support ticket, including your New Relic account name, and the email address 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.

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 :)

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!

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

Silver support acts as an extension to our renowned “standard” Bronze support and includes 24/7 emergency telephone support and 30 minutes of Hands-on support each month. Silver support is priced at £49/month or 20% of account spend (whichever is greater).

Gold support is our proactive, fully managed service and includes all features of Bronze and Silver plans plus inclusive Managed Backups, application/cluster support and 24/7 monitoring and response. Gold support is priced at £349/month or 30% of account spend (whichever is greater).

We continue to offer “Pay-as-you-go” hands-on support from our experts at £30 per 30 minutes.

For further information on support plans or any of our services, please get in touch and we’ll be happy to help.

Each SoR attendee will get a voucher for a free beer, glass of wine or soft drink and some pizza, so bring yours along and hand it to the bar staff.

When?
Friday 27th March @ 10pm (straight after lightning talks)

Where?
Fingers Piano Bar, 61 Frederick Street, Edinburgh EH2 1LH (map)

See you there!