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 feature: Label your Brightboxes 14 Jan 09

We’ll be releasing lots of cool features for our control panel over the next couple of months. The latest of these features is a small addition but something that customers will hopefully find useful, especially those with several Brightboxes.

You can now add your own simple labels to each of your boxes so you can quickly remember which box is which. Previously, you only really had the box hostname e.g myapp-001.vm.brightbox.net as a reference, but you can now also add your own label e.g “Bob’s staging server”.

New feature: MySQL slow query log 10 Dec 08

As mentioned in my previous post, we’ve got several exciting features for the Brightbox control panel in the pipeline. The latest of these, which we’re releasing today, is the MySQL slow query log. This feature will assist customers in optimising their databases by displaying details of slow queries executed by their MySQL user on our shared cluster.

If the nightly log parser find any slow queries for your user, the data will be added to your list and an alert will be displayed when you login to the control panel.

Clicking the alert, will take you to the main MySQL service page where you will see a list of unacknowledged queries.

Of course, this feature will simply let you know you have a slow query that you should investigate and optimise. How to optimise your database queries is beyond the scope of this blog post :)

Using RSpec, Cucumber and User stories to build our internal systems 21 Nov 08

Here at Brightbox we are making heavy use of RSpec and Cucumber as we develop our next generation internal systems. These let us write specifications, in English and in code, for how the systems should behave. The specifications document the system for future reference and provide an automated test suite to prove that things are working as they should.

We chose RSpec because of its philosophy of “getting the words right”; code is often easier to write than it is read. As these specifications are also our internal documentation they must be easy to read as well.

However, as some of this Behaviour-Driven and Story-Driven development is pretty new, there isn’t much guidance on best practice, especially when it comes to the “User Stories” (which form the basis of the system’s acceptance tests). With that in mind, we thought we’d share our basic process we follow for each new feature.

(Download the original presentation here)

By the way, there’s a very subtle bug in the code; no prizes if you spot it!