Today we’re announcing support for version 17 of PostgreSQL in Cloud SQL. PostgreSQL 17 contains a number of new features and enhancements, including: N...
Read blog postAs part of our managed ops services we often need to share sensitive information such as passwords and keys with customers. GPG is commonly used for this kin...
Read blog postFlatcar Container Linux is a minimal, container-optimised Linux distribution, which is a direct descendent and spiritual successor of CoreOS Container Linux,...
Read blog postLast year we introduced the ability to resize Cloud Servers, which makes it really quick and easy to increase RAM/CPU and SSD storage for your cloud servers....
Read blog postIn the world of infrastructure as code (IaC), Terraform has been a stalwart companion for nearly a decade. However, recent changes in its licensing have left...
Read blog postThis is part 3 of a 3-part series where we solve the Dining Philosophers concurrency problem using just UNIX, systemd and some bash scripting! In part 2 we ...
Read blog postThis is part 2 of a 3-part series where we solve the Dining Philosophers concurrency problem using just UNIX, systemd and some bash scripting! In part 1, we...
Read blog postOver the years, developers seem to have forgotten that Unix is a Programming Environment and not just something you must install to access your web server. U...
Read blog postI’m pleased to announce the initial beta launch of our simple metrics service which makes a selection of graphs available for Cloud Servers, Cloud SQL Instan...
Read blog postResizing Cloud Servers has always been possible but required snapshots and some inevitable downtime; a frustrating experience if you need to resize because y...
Read blog postSince announcing our container registry back in 2019, usage has grown and it has become a critical part of our service. And with the continued adoption of Do...
Read blog postHere’s how to automatically build docker images and push them to the Brightbox Container Registry using a GitHub Action. Setup the container repository Fir...
Read blog postAll new Brightbox cloud servers are built from an initial Server Image which provides the base operating system. We provide several official up-to-date image...
Read blog postBack in June we announced Block Storage Volumes which (amongst other things) can make running Kubernetes easier by allowing storage to be moved between serve...
Read blog postWe’ve been providing CentOS images for cloud servers for many years now. In December 2020, RedHat announced that CentOS 8 would be the last version to be a 1...
Read blog postOver the past few months we’ve been working on some major improvements to the backend infrastructure for Cloud SQL – our simple Database-as-a-Service – with ...
Read blog postIt’s no secret that our object storage system, Orbit, runs Openstack Swift under the hood. The Openstack Swift storage API is widely supported so it’s easy t...
Read blog postIf you’ve noticed we’ve been a bit quiet lately, it’s because for the last several months we’ve been working on what is probably the largest set of improveme...
Read blog postAs part of the upgrade to version 2 of the Brightbox Go API I’ve been using some of the newer features Go has introduced over the past few years: generators,...
Read blog postAs part of the upgrade to version 2 of the Brightbox Go API I’ve been using some of the newer features Go has introduced over the past few years: generators,...
Read blog postAs part of the upgrade to version 2 of the Brightbox Go API I’ve been using some of the newer features Go has introduced over the past few years: generators,...
Read blog postIt’s been 9 years since we first released the first Windows Server 2008 cloud server image and so we are just about due for an updated image! So, I’m please...
Read blog postWe first launched our “floating” Cloud IPs feature over 10 years ago with IPv4-only public addresses, enabling customers to decouple their applications from ...
Read blog postOur snapshot feature enables you to create a reusable point-in-time copy of an existing Cloud Server disk which can be used as the source image for building ...
Read blog postCeph is an open source fault tolerant distributed storage system. It’s getting a lot of attention in the Kubernetes world via the Rook project, but you can i...
Read blog postI’m really excited to announce the availability of our brand new customer control panel app! We’re calling it a “beta” launch, although it’s pretty much full...
Read blog postWe’ve recently released version 2 of our Terraform provider which brings our Terraform support up to date both with the latest advances of the Brightbox API ...
Read blog postI’m pleased to announce that our Cloud Servers now support encryption at rest! When enabled, all data written to the local virtual disk attached to your clou...
Read blog postWe now have Ruby packages for the current Ubuntu LTS release: Focal, 20.04. A bit overdue but they’re here now. We’re currently supporting Ruby 2.4, 2.5, 2.6...
Read blog postI’m pleased to announce that our Load Balancers now fully support TLS 1.3. Newly created load balancers have actually supported TLS 1.3 for a while but we’ve...
Read blog postSince the last post on how the Kubernetes Autoscaler works on Brightbox we’ve been hard at work improving it. Scaling From Zero Whereas previously there ha...
Read blog postPreviously, we explained how to securely install the Kubernetes Metrics Server. However, the Kubernetes Controller Manager will only approve certificate sign...
Read blog postPrometheus: Titan god of fire and distributed metrics collection. Prometheus is a metrics gathering system used for monitoring and alerting. It discovers ...
Read blog postThe Kubernetes Metrics Server is service that can be run within Kubernetes to provide container resource metrics, such as CPU and RAM usage. Those metrics ca...
Read blog postWhen building systems that integrate with our API, sometimes you need to store some configuration or state. It’s natural to want to store this somewhere in o...
Read blog postWe’ve just launched our Kubernetes autoscaler, which creates and destroys new Kubernetes cluster nodes in response to demand and I thought I’d go into more d...
Read blog postToday I’m really pleased to announce the Brightbox Kubernetes Autoscaler. With this enabled, your Kubernetes cluster can grow and shrink its own cloud server...
Read blog postWe’ve recently added container quota support to our Orbit Cloud Object Storage service, allowing you to set container size and object count limits on a per-c...
Read blog postToday we’re announcing support for PostgreSQL 12 as a new engine version for Cloud SQL, our zero-config database service. PostgreSQL 12 brings loads of new ...
Read blog postIt’s a Bank Holiday here in the UK and that’s the traditional time when Systems People take to their retreats and work on their Foo. Since Functional Progra...
Read blog postOrbit is our durable and highly available cloud storage service, based on OpenStack Swift. We provide an SSH file transfer protocol gateway to Orbit which a...
Read blog postGiven the sudden importance of staying indoors, we’ve been getting a number of questions about self-hosting video conferencing services on Brightbox. So we’v...
Read blog postIn this period of unprecedented uncertainty, the last thing you need to be worrying about is your cloud infrastructure. To that end I want to describe just ...
Read blog postWhen you create a Brightbox Server the root partition is automatically expanded to fill the entire disk on first-boot. Normally this is exactly what you want...
Read blog postThe Nearly Tool In the previous parts of this blog series we’ve covered various ways to manipulate and test Kubernetes YAML manifests using Ruby. But what i...
Read blog postStory So Far In the last part of this blog series we used OpenAPI to create a typed Kubernetes manifest that will raise exceptions if you use incorrect attr...
Read blog postStory So Far In the previous post we saw how we can create a Kubernetes Manifest from a Ruby Hash. However, to check we don’t add incorrect values we have t...
Read blog postKubernetes is a useful system for managing modern deployments, but it is a big beast whose flexibility brings with it a new twist on some old, old problems -...
Read blog postWhen deploying a larger web app onto Kubernetes it’s common to run a dedicated web service layer to proxy onto the application pods, perhaps doing some appli...
Read blog postOn Monday, three TCP networking vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel were disclosed by Netflix. The most severe of which could allow an attacker to crash a Li...
Read blog postWe’ve been hard at work on our Brightbox Terraform provider over the last few weeks and I thought I’d write up some of the improvements. Terraform is a tool...
Read blog postToday we’re announcing our new Container Registry service which makes it easy to store and retrieve your Docker container images. It’s nicely integrated wit...
Read blog postTL;DR We’re taking steps to provide further clarity for EU customers post-Brexit I’m fully aware that the last thing you’re probably wanting to hear about r...
Read blog postOur Load Balancer API now supports the PROXY Protocol, which is a standard for sending client connection information from proxies through to back end servers...
Read blog postOrbit is our highly durable object storage service which is used to store Cloud Server and Cloud SQL snapshots, and also provides an API that customers can u...
Read blog postToday, we’re really pleased to announce new lower pricing for Cloud Servers, Cloud SQL and Cloud IPs which will reduce costs for customers by up to 40%! At ...
Read blog postWe first launched our Load Balancing service back in January 2011 and have been making continual improvements over the last 8 years. Today, though, we’re an...
Read blog postOrbit is our highly available and durable object storage service. All Cloud Server and Cloud SQL snapshots are stored in Orbit, but it can be used directly v...
Read blog postEach year, on the 25th of December, the Ruby community receives the gift of a new release of Ruby. 2018 was no exception, and Ruby 2.6.0 arrived as promised....
Read blog postOn Friday we released updates of our Kubernetes Cloud Controller: A new major release to support the new 1.13 version of Kubernetes and minor releases to sta...
Read blog postToday we’re celebrating 11 years since we officially started Brightbox. 11 might seem like a strange number to celebrate specifically. It would be easy for y...
Read blog postWe’ve released a new version of our Brightbox Kubernetes Cloud Controller Manager which now supports our Load Balancer service. It allows Kubernetes to creat...
Read blog postWe’re pleased to announce that Brightbox now supports Two-factor authentication. Two-factor authentication (2FA) has been a rather long-running feature requ...
Read blog postWe’re pleased to announce the initial release of the Brightbox Kubernetes Cloud Controller Manager. Kubernetes is an open-source orchestration system for co...
Read blog postToday Intel disclosed details of new speculative execution vulnerabilities called “L1 Terminal Fault”, or L1TF for short. They’ve been assigned the CVE ids C...
Read blog postWe’re pleased to announce that the Brightbox Terraform Provider is now officially included in Hashicorp’s Terraform cloud provider repository and so can now ...
Read blog postI’m sure you will already be aware of the GDPR - the comprehensive reform of European Union (EU) privacy law which comes into force on 25 May 2018. At Brigh...
Read blog postThe first stable release of Ruby 2.5 arrived on schedule on December 25th. As usual, it brings loads of new features, bug fixes and quite a few performance i...
Read blog postWe use Jenkins extensively within Brightbox to manage our Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment(CI/CD) architecture and keep Brightbox bang up to date...
Read blog postMany developers and engineers now use docker to simplify development and deployment, and we’re now pleased to announce we have dockerised two of our command ...
Read blog postAn industry-wide issue has been found with how modern microprocessors implement speculative execution of instructions. There are three main variants of the i...
Read blog postToday I’m very pleased to announce IPv6 support for Cloud IPs. So now you can instantly move IPv6 IP addresses between Cloud Servers, Load Balancers and Clou...
Read blog postToday we’re releasing an update of our provider plugin for Hashicorp’s Terraform. Terraform is a tool to make managing your overall system infrastructure as...
Read blog postWe’ve been working with CockroachDB lately and have been very impressed. It’s an open source, distributed, highly-available SQL database server. It’s been in...
Read blog postWe’ve updated our Debian and FreeBSD Cloud Server images and a couple of details of how to use them have changed. Debian 9 Debia...
Read blog postToday, we’re pleased to announce automated SSL/TLS certificate management for Brightbox Load Balancers, using Let’s Encrypt! Brightbox Load Balancers distri...
Read blog postWe’ve just released updated Ruby 2.4, 2.3 and 2.2 packages for Ubuntu. Ruby 2.2.7 Ruby 2.2.7 brings about 70 bug fixes since 2.2.6 but is also the last mai...
Read blog postOver the last few weeks we’ve been rolling out improvements to resource lists in Brightbox Manager. All resources, such as Cloud Servers, Load Balancers, SQ...
Read blog postThe first stable release of Ruby 2.4 arrived on schedule on December 25th. As usual, it has various new features, bug fixes and quite a few performance impro...
Read blog postWe’ve just released updated Ruby 2.3 and 2.2 packages for Ubuntu. Both Ruby 2.2.6 and 2.3.3 were released in November with updated Rubygems SSL certificates...
Read blog postWe’ve written a guide on how to import a MySQL database into a Cloud SQL instance while minimising downtime. The trick is to take an initial dump of the data...
Read blog postToday, we’re pleased to announce beta support for PostgreSQL 9.5 as a new engine option for Cloud SQL, our zero-config simple database service. PostgreSQL s...
Read blog postAll our Cloud Servers come with resilient local permanent disks, stored on SSDs in a RAID configuration. For periodic backups, you can use our server snapsho...
Read blog postNixOS is a Linux distribution that is configured using a functional language in a declarative way. I’ve been using it here at Brightbox as my main developme...
Read blog postWe’ve just added a new scheduled snapshots feature to Cloud SQL, our hassle-free MySQL cloud database service. Cloud SQL has always supported manually takin...
Read blog postLast week, the issue of Ubuntu trademarks raised its head once again, due to some claims from some service providers that they’re being told they have to pay...
Read blog postWe’ve just rolled out a new feature for our Cloud SQL service: custom maintenance windows. Every Cloud SQL instance is regularly updated with the latest sec...
Read blog postWhen building clusters that can dynamically change, you need to be able to discover when new servers come and old servers go. Brightbox cloud servers can loo...
Read blog postToday we’re announcing Brightbox support for Hashicorp’s Terraform in the form of a new provider plugin. Terraform is a tool to make managing your overall s...
Read blog postMany of our customers need to keep track of the costs of certain groups of cloud resources. Often this is to allow accurate billing of their own customers, o...
Read blog postThe first stable release of Ruby 2.3 arrived right on schedule on December 25th. It sports a few interesting new language features plus lots of little improv...
Read blog postWe recently came across a problem that was affecting mail delivery from servers on Brightbox. Specifically, it only looked to be affecting deliveries to one ...
Read blog postDocker Machine is a Docker server manager. It takes care of creating and bootstrapping new servers on which to run Docker and helps you manage them from then...
Read blog postWe’ve recently been using the Go programming language internally for a couple of projects and we’ve had the need to interact with our own API, so we’ve start...
Read blog postFollowing our OAuth API improvements back in August, we’ve been able to make some changes to our command line tool to make it easier to use. We now support ...
Read blog postJuju is described as a state-of-the-art, open source, universal model for service oriented architecture and service oriented deployments. It takes the confi...
Read blog postThe Brightbox API for Cloud Resources is authenticated using OAuth 2.0. The OAuth 2.0 spec was still a draft when we first implemented it and has changed qu...
Read blog postFlynn bills itself as a next generation open source Platform as a Service (PaaS). It can run stateful services as well as the modern ‘Twelve Factor Web Apps...
Read blog postLast week CentOS announced the general availability of their Atomic Host distro and images are now available on Brightbox Cloud. CentOS Atomic Host is a ligh...
Read blog postA new security vulnerability was announced yesterday (CVE-2015-3456, nicknamed VENOM) in KVM/QEMU’s floppy disk controller emulation. It can theoretically al...
Read blog postSSD storage is here at Brightbox! From today you can build high performance ssd cloud servers and see 85,000 random read IOPS and over 1 Gigabyte per second...
Read blog postThis week, new versions of Ruby were released fixing a security bug related to overly permissive matching of hostnames in certificates (CVE-2015-1855). We’v...
Read blog postHere at Brightbox we use Jenkins to manage most of our continuous integration and deployment jobs. It lets us do all the usual automatic builds, merges and d...
Read blog postCentOS 7.1 was announced yesterday afternoon and is now available on Brightbox. As with our official Ubuntu images, we import all new CentOS releases automat...
Read blog postIf you’re using Docker to run anything serious, you’ll have needed to store your images somewhere other than your development machine. Docker Inc. run a cen...
Read blog postIn December, Canonical released a new rendition of their distro called Ubuntu Core. It’s kind of an Ubuntu-flavoured CoreOS, sporting transactional updates, ...
Read blog postThe switch in question is definitely dead. No lights. No fans. Unresponsive. Each Brightbox rack switch carries public and private network connectivity for ...
Read blog postDebian has always been available to run on Brightbox, commonly by booting the installer with our PXE-boot environment, or our Bootstaller image. But running...
Read blog postA new security vulnerability (CVE-2015-0235) was announced yesterday in GLIBC which allows a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code. The bug is in the GLI...
Read blog postGareth Rushgrove (@garethr) is the curator behind Devops Weekly - the incredibly popular email newsletter for all things operations and devops related. We as...
Read blog postWeb applications often need to store assets uploaded by users such as profile pictures or documents. The most convenient place to store these may be the web ...
Read blog postLast month we announced our new OpenStack Swift-compatible object storage service, Orbit, which makes it easy to store many gigabytes or terrabytes of data s...
Read blog postAs is the yearly tradition, a new stable version of Ruby, 2.2.0, was released on the 25th December. We’re of course providing Ubuntu packages for Ubuntu 14....
Read blog postIt’s been a few years since we first provided FreeBSD images for Brightbox. Unfortunately, these older images did not include virtio network or disk driver s...
Read blog postToday I’m very pleased to announce Orbit - our new highly available and durable object storage service, based on OpenStack Swift. You can check out the full...
Read blog postToday Ubuntu released a new rendition of their distro called Ubuntu Core. It’s kind of a Ubuntu-flavoured CoreOS, sporting transactional updates, docker supp...
Read blog postIn our development team at Brightbox, in addition to working on new products and features, we’re continually working on performance optimisations for our var...
Read blog postHigh performance hardware is not something we’ve ever skimped on here at Brightbox. While many cloud hosting providers trundled along on poor performing, dat...
Read blog postScaling a web deployment beyond a single server inevitably involves sharing files between multiple servers. Traditionally, this might have been handled using...
Read blog postBrightbox makes building cloud servers, load balancers, SQL instances and other infrastructure components really easy. The knife cuts both ways though and de...
Read blog postDeadlocks are dreadful. They can be a minor annoyance or, depending on your application’s domain, can seriously affect functionality. At Brightbox, many of ...
Read blog postBrightbox enables you to build scalable applications very quickly, by creating a number of cloud servers and placing them behind a cloud load balancer, but, ...
Read blog postUPDATE: Ruby 2.2 is now fully released and we’ve updated our packages. The first preview version of the upcoming Ruby 2.2.0 release was made available back ...
Read blog postThe race from IPv4 to IPv6 might be the slowest race in history, but it’s on nevertheless and, despite some uncertainty, it seems clear that more and more us...
Read blog postLast week, security researchers at Google published details of a vulnerability in the design of SSL version 3.0, which they’ve named POODLE (Padding Oracle O...
Read blog postEven if you’re not a sysadmin, you’ll probably have heard of the latest bash security vulnerability - it was hard to miss news of the “deadly serious” bug du...
Read blog postOver the past few days there has been much discussion relating to a security-update for the GNU Bourne Again Shell (bash). The security hole relates to a li...
Read blog postOur Cloud Load Balancers add fault tolerance and horizontal scalability to your systems by enabling you to balance traffic across a pool of Cloud Servers. W...
Read blog postAs part of the Ubuntu Certified Cloud programme, Canonical now publish a syndicated feed of officially supported Ubuntu images available on Brightbox. The f...
Read blog postWith the recent release of Wordpress 4.0 I’ve written up a new guide to deploying it in a scalable fashion to Ubuntu 14.04 on Brightbox. The deploying Wordp...
Read blog postWe’ve been building CentOS 7 cloud images for a while now, but today CentOS released their own ‘Generic Cloud’ image that they intend to use as the base for ...
Read blog postYesterday, I was debugging a puppet module that was causing Ubuntu Trusty servers to stop booting properly. The system would boot about half way and stop, be...
Read blog postCentOS 7 was announced this month, and is now available on Brightbox. There are a couple of ways to get going with CentOS, depending on your requirements. I...
Read blog postToday, we’re really pleased to announce that we have joined the Ubuntu Certified Public Cloud programme, which means our Ubuntu cloud images are now official...
Read blog postGitLab is basically an open source clone of GitHub, allowing you to host your own git-based code collaboration system. We’re been fans of GitLab here at Bri...
Read blog postWe’ve rolled out a couple of improvements to our cloud load balancer service this week. They’re only little tweaks but they help you tighten up your security...
Read blog postWe’ve just released some major updates to the Brightbox Cloud Manager dashboard, which we’re pretty excited about! We’re hoping these improvements will both ...
Read blog postWe’re big users of fog here at Brightbox. Not only is it used in our CLI tool but we use it within our control panel to access our API. This blog post discu...
Read blog postThe latest “long term support” release of Ubuntu went live today: Ubuntu 14.04 “Trusty Tahr”. We’ve been importing the daily builds of all Ubuntu releases si...
Read blog postA new security vulnerability was announced yesterday (CVE-2014-0160) in OpenSSL that allows an attacker to read up to 64kB of memory. Any service that suppor...
Read blog postWe’ve been providing CoreOS images on Brightbox since back in October but we often lag behind their official releases a little. So, in the spirit of CoreOS’s...
Read blog postDue to various auditing failures and other security issues, the CAcert root certificate set is slowly disappearing from the Ubuntu and Debian ‘ca-certificate...
Read blog postIt’s nearly four years since we began building Brightbox, so we thought we’d write a series of blog posts detailing some of the design decisions we’ve made o...
Read blog postToday, we’re making it even easier to get started with Brightbox by offering £50 of free trial usage for new customers. The free ...
Read blog postAs of today, Brightbox Cloud SQL (which we announced a couple of weeks back) now supports MySQL 5.6 in addition to MySQL 5.5. MySQL 5.6 brings lots of new ...
Read blog postAs Brightbox continues to grow, we’re able to benefit from increased economies of scale. Unlike many other “cloud providers”, we actually maintain our own n...
Read blog postToday, we’re pleased to be announcing the beta launch of Brightbox Cloud SQL - our new cloud database service… Cloud SQL combines the performance and securi...
Read blog postRuby 2.1 was released on the 25th December and we’re now including it in our Ubuntu packaging project. We’re providing packages for Ubuntu Precise, Quantal, ...
Read blog postBrightbox Cloud Load Balancers provide a rock-solid solution for fault tolerance and horizontal scalability. They support balancing TCP, HTTP and WebSocket c...
Read blog postBack in February I was interviewed for the new 37signals book Remote: Office not required. Here’s the transcript of that interview for those of you intereste...
Read blog postWe web developers are mostly careless about database locks. It is something we throw in as a last measure, when we don’t want anyone to touch the record we a...
Read blog postWe’ve been providing our own custom-built Fedora images for a while now but we’re very happy to see that Fedora is now providing their own cloud-based images...
Read blog postWe’re now providing server images for CoreOS. CoreOS is a lightweight operating system built for large-scale distributed deployments. It comes with a self-as...
Read blog postWe’re looking for an experienced and motivated Linux Systems Administrator to join our join our small but highly productive team here at Brightbox. Main res...
Read blog postWe’ve just released a major new version of our command line tool, v1.0.0 - it’s available for installation right now on Windows, OSX and the various GNU/Linu...
Read blog postToday we have two exciting Cloud Server pricing announcements… Firstly, we’ve added a new “standard” tier of Cloud Servers, designed for more agile workload...
Read blog postManaging cloud applications is rarely a one person project; there’s often a team of people involved. Something is wrong if all the members of your team have ...
Read blog postWe published updated NGINX packages to our Passenger 4 Ubuntu package repository this week. NGINX is now upgraded to 1.4.2, and Passenger to 4.0.10. We upgra...
Read blog postI’m very much a command line guy, but our new web gui really makes managing firewall policies for large numbers of servers really easy. I’ve put together a s...
Read blog postWe’ve just released version 2.4.1 of the Brightbox deployment gem, which includes a raft of improvements and some important changes. In general, it fixes a ...
Read blog postYou may have noticed that we’ve been a little quiet for the last couple of months. I’m really pleased to finally show you the results of our hard work - the ...
Read blog postWe’ve been busy updating our Passenger and Ruby packages for Ubuntu over the last week or so. Passenger 3.0.21 was released, primarily to address a security ...
Read blog postFinally there is a hint of Spring in the air. And that can mean only one thing. It’s time to update the Brightbox Official Images. The RedHat Enterprise de...
Read blog postWe provide standard images for Windows and several Linux distributions. That’s great if you want to get going quickly or have systems that are designed to wo...
Read blog postWe’ve been busy over on the Brightbox tech blog so I thought I’d do a roundup here. We’ve been maintaining up-to-date Ruby packages for Ubuntu for several y...
Read blog postI mentioned the other day that our Vagrant integration wasn’t as smooth as I’d like. So I’ve fixed that for you. The Brightbox documentation site now publi...
Read blog postSome of you who watch the Gem feeds may have noticed that I sneaked out a provider plugin for Vagrant that supports Brightbox. Vagrant is a tool, written in...
Read blog postThe latest beta version of Phusion Passenger 4, beta 2, was announced last month. You can read more about it in Phusion’s blog post. We’ve updated our Ubunt...
Read blog postTwo serious vulnerabilities in Rails have been discovered. They concern the parsing of JSON and XML request bodies and can result in an attacker bypassing co...
Read blog postWe’ve been maintaining updated and tuned Ruby packages for Ubuntu for many years now and most recently we’ve been using Sokolov Yura’s performance patches to...
Read blog postI’ve been testing the ram usage performance of various versions of Ruby, to compare the effectiveness of Narihiro Nakamura’s bitmap marking garbage collector...
Read blog postWe’ve pushed updated Ubuntu Ruby 1.9.3 packages to our experimental launchpad repository. They’re from upstream 1.9.3-p327, which fixes the hash-flooding Do...
Read blog postThe team at Phusion recently announced the first beta release of Passenger 4.0. It’s got some great new features, such as support for running multiple versio...
Read blog postIn July, the technology review website Phoronix published several benchmarks they ran of Ubuntu 12.04 running on Amazon EC2. The benchmarking software Phoron...
Read blog postWe’ve just updated the official images on Brightbox. The RedHat Enterprise derivatives (Centos, Scientific Linux) are now at version 6.3 and Ubuntu Precise i...
Read blog postWe’re big fans of Puppet here at Brightbox and have been using it for years to manage the configuration of many hundreds of servers. puppet-git-receiver is ...
Read blog postWe just deployed a little improvement to our web based graphical server console. It now operates entirely over one single tcp port, https port 443, which mak...
Read blog postWe recently added Brightbox support to RedHat’s “cloud appliance builder” project BoxGrinder, which makes it easy to build customised rpm-based distro images...
Read blog postLast week we rolled out a few improvements to the image library facility on Brightbox. You might have already noticed that creating a cloud server is now fa...
Read blog postWe’ve been providing Ubuntu images in the Brightbox image library since we first launched, but what you might not know is that we provide weekly builds of cu...
Read blog postWe’re really pleased to be hosting CloudCamp North in Leeds on the 14 June, alongside our MC for the evening Paul Miller - writer, analyst and consultant of ...
Read blog postRecently, some security researchers identified a security vulnerability with some cloud services (in particular VPS.net and Rackspace Cloud) that caused cust...
Read blog postIf you’ve been looking for a good solution for hosting multiple SSL/TLS sites on the same cloud server, then look no further! Our new Port Translation featur...
Read blog postWe’re extending the free period for usage fees associated with the Image Library to 1 Jun 2012. This means it will remain completely free of charge to take, ...
Read blog post“Real-time”, “asynchronous”, “event-driven”, “distributed” are all words familiar to today’s developer. Two examples where this is more evident than anywher...
Read blog postUbuntu’s next Long Term Support release, 12.04 “Precise Pangolin”, is due at the end of April and it’s looking really good! To make it simple to help with b...
Read blog postI’ll be up in Edinburgh at the FLOSS UK Spring Conference on Thursday (22nd March) and at Puppet Camp the following day. I’m doing a talk about distributed ...
Read blog postToday, we’re announcing two new super-sized (and imaginatively-titled!) Server Types, XL and XXL, which are available for you to use right away. In Brightb...
Read blog post“Any OS, any app, any time”, whilst not any sort of official slogan or mantra, is a phrase that has been ticking over in my head for a while and sums up the...
Read blog postEagle-eyed observers might have noticed that we quietly rolled out IPv6 addressing into Brightbox over the last couple of weeks. In fact, John’s Riak Cluster...
Read blog postI’ve just published a new guide on the docs site that takes you through building a small four node Riak database cluster on Brightbox Cloud. It covers server...
Read blog postI’m very excited to announce today the release of our distributed stateful Cloud Firewall service for Brightbox! The new firewall service provides a highly-...
Read blog postBrightbox Cloud IPs now support using your own custom reverse DNS names. Cloud IPs automatically have a preconfigured default reverse DNS entry, which looks...
Read blog postEarlier today we officially removed the “beta” label and enabled full signup, meaning anyone can now signup and be up-and-running on Brightbox within minut...
Read blog postIn 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 aro...
Read blog postWe’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 ...
Read blog postI 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 w...
Read blog postJob description: 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...
Read blog postThere 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...
Read blog postToday, we’re excited to announce Brightbox Cloud Balancers – our new distributed load balancing service which is available right now as part of the cloud bet...
Read blog postHot 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 Bri...
Read blog postLast week we added a “compatibility” mode to our new cloud hosting platform, which allows running operating systems without virtio support. This opens up ou...
Read blog postToday, we’re announcing the private beta launch of Brightbox Cloud – our new IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) platform! We’ve dedicated several months to ...
Read blog postAs I’m sure you’re aware, Rails can be told to use ActiveRecord (and hence the MySQL database) to store session data. (New Rails apps use the cookie store by...
Read blog postA major part of our work behind the scenes is about improving our internal processes and, whenever possible, automating tasks. To this end we have a number ...
Read blog postHere 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 En...
Read blog postIt’s amazing how quickly guides on the Internet go out of date. I suppose this one will be no exception. However as I’ve been looking around there doesn’t ap...
Read blog postEveryone knows the dangers of old hard disks being discarded with sensitive data still on them, but what about virtual disks? With so many virtual machine h...
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