We’ve just released a new version of the Brightbox deployment gem. The gem has supported bundler for a long time, but now calls to rake tasks use bundler too (if the app is bundler enabled of course). This solves the problem some people were having where the right gems weren’t available during rake execution, or rake itself complained about a rake version mismatch.
We’ve built Ubuntu packages for the latest release of Phusion Passenger, 3.0.11. They’re available now on our apt repository and our Launchpad ppa. Instructions on how to get set up are on our wiki as usual.
Updated NGINX Passenger packages will follow shortly (they’ll be available via a separate ppa)
We’ve built Ubuntu packages for the latest release of Passenger, 3.0.8. They’re available now on our apt repository and our Launchpad ppa. Instructions on how to get set up are on our wiki as usual.
Updated NGINX Passenger packages will follow shortly (they’ll be available via a separate ppa)
We’ve updated our NGINX packages to NGINX v1.0.0 and Passenger 3.0.7. They’re now hosted on Launchpad.net, which makes it dead easy to use in Ubuntu.
We’ve also fixed the dependency problems that occurred in the past, where a newer version of Passenger broke the older NGINX packages. These NGINX packages now strictly depend on the Passenger packages, and we’ve put them in their own Launchpad archive so they’re always guaranteed to work (even if they ever lag behind the Apache packages).
You can add the PPA and install NGINX like this:
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:brightbox/passenger-nginx
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nginx-full
You’ll then need to enable the Passenger module, which can be usually done like this:
cat <<EOF > /etc/nginx/conf.d/passenger.conf
passenger_root /usr/lib/phusion-passenger;
EOFWe’ve also added our other Apache Passenger packages to Launchpad too (with Hardy support), just use:
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:brightbox/passengerWe’ll keep our own apt repository in sync with Launchpad for Hardy and Lucid too, in case you prefer that (use the passenger-nginx component for the nginx passenger packages).
Happy Passengering! (I’m pretty certain that’s not a real verb. It might be a proper verb. I’m pretty certain there is no such thing as a proper verb).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Remote, but ideally working within 2 hours of UTC.
circa £55k p.a. (depending on experience).
Friday 22nd April 2011.
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
Last week we added a “compatibility” mode to our new cloud platform, which allows running operating systems without virtio support. This opens up our platform beyond Linux, and for starters we’ve added FreeBSD 8.1 images:
$ brightbox-images list img-1okdf img-aoubd
id owner type created_on status size name
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
img-1okdf brightbox official 2010-11-19 public 20480 FreeBSD 8.1 minimal (i686)
img-aoubd brightbox official 2010-11-19 public 20480 FreeBSD 8.1 minimal (x86_64)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As you’d expect, you can control FreeBSD servers via the API, just like any other Brightbox cloud server – and that includes snapshotting the disk. If you’re a FreeBSD nerd and want to have a play, then sign up to our beta.
Now I’m off to learn how to use FreeBSD to see what all the fuss is about :)
Phusion Passenger 3.0.0 was released back in October. It’s up to 55% faster and sports new stability features, which should keep your site up even if a faulty app instance causes problems (such as “out of memory” errors).
We’ve now got Ubuntu Hardy and Lucid packages available on our apt repository and we consider it ready for production use. Brightbox customers can upgrade from Passengr 2.x simply by running these commands on their Brightboxes:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -qy libapache2-mod-passengerIf you’ve not got a Brightbox, you’ll need to add our apt repository key and config first. You can read more about it on our wiki.
Brightbox’s birthday is a matter of days away and we’re starting our fourth year by increasing RAM for all Brightboxes by 50%. We’ll be upgrading existing Brightboxes over the next couple of weeks, though the product names in the control panel will change straight away.
Since you’ll now be able to fit more app processes on your Brightboxes, you’ll need more MySQL connections, so we’re doubling those for all products too.
And as if this wasn’t enough, we’re expanding our New Relic RPM offering to include all Brightbox sizes. See our wiki page for more details about getting it set up.
We’re taking the opportunity to rename our products too, as naming by RAM size starts to get a bit ugly when you move beyond powers of two. The table below shows how the products are being renamed and what your new RAM size will be. Happy birthday us!
| Old name | New name | New RAM | MySQL conns |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brightbox 256 | Brightbox Nano | 384 | 10 |
| Brightbox 512 | Brightbox Mini | 768 | 20 |
| Brightbox 1GB | Brightbox Small | 1536 | 30 |
| Brightbox 2GB | Brightbox Medium | 3072 | 40 |
| Brightbox 4GB | Brightbox Large | 6144 | 50 |
We’ve got some other big things in the pipeline too, so stay tuned. The next few months are going to be great.
Update (19 October 2010): We have now completed these upgrades for all customers. The extra MySQL connections are already available to everyone. Customers who have not rebooted their Brightboxes recently will need to do so in order to start using their extra RAM.
The team at Phusion have been hard at work on Passenger 3 and last week released a beta version for testing. Continuing our work with Passenger 2, we’ve been working hard on packaging it.
We now have Passenger 3.0.0-pre3 packages available for Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) and Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy). As they’re pre-release versions, we don’t recommend them in production just yet and have put them in their own repository to prevent any accidental upgrades.
If you’re not already a Brightbox customer, then you’ll need to set up base access to our apt repository first.
Otherwise, just add the new passenger-testing repository (switch “lucid” to “hardy” if you’re on Hardy):
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://apt.brightbox.net lucid passenger-testing" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox-passenger-testing.list'
Then you can upgrade/install 3.0.0-1bbox1~pre3
apt-get update
apt-get install libapache2-mod-passenger
Passenger now has a native library, which depends on your version of ruby. For simplicity, these packages currently require the ruby1.8 packages to be installed. You can, of course, switch to ruby1.9 and passenger will auto-compile the necessary native support for you. We’ll be providing packages for 1.9 support soon, so you won’t need to rely on the auto-compiling.