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The Danish Cloud Standoff
For those unaware of it, things in the cloud business are heating up here in the Northern part of Europe. It seems to be finally dawning on the EU, that “the cloud” is not some minor issue that should be handled as an afterthought after all the “real” market issues like industry, agriculture, fishing, oil, banking, etc. have been handled. The reality is, that the cloud is one of the most important and most pressing issues of our time, and the EU is very late to the game. Today, the cloud is how we place phone calls, discuss political issues, maintain personal relations, find information, stay updated, communicate and perhaps even more importantly, how our companies do all of their communication, financial transactions, in short all of their business. Cloud fiefdoms, search engines and social networks have replaced markets. All communication, commerce and finance today depends on the cloud. By extension, those who control the cloud, control our societies.
Edit your documents in your own space
Having a word processor, a spreadsheet and a presentation tool available in a web browser is very, very cool – especially for collaborative work.
Storing your documents in some tech giants’ cloud without the slightest idea about where your data is being stored and what your data is used for, and editing your documents using tools made available for you without access to the source code, in short, simply handing over all your personal documents to a giant, foreign entity outside your country’s rule of law, is not so cool.
To the Cloud (and Back)
To the Cloud
Recently I agreed to help a start-up that had lost their lead developer and were in quite a pickle. This gave me an opportunity to dig into some of the more obscure corners of Amazon’s offerings. Their stuff was built on, and ran in AWS. The task at hand: Process audio from players on a sports team recorded during a game or a training session, transcribe it to text, do some statistics on the words found and present the results in a UI. The idea: to analyze and improve team performance through improved communication. I took over their existing code and tech stack which tried to do all of that.
Read more…We should have a plan for when Russia cuts our Internet
Here in DK that is. Just saying…
Looking For an Alternative to Google Analytics?
Matomo is a great alternative to Google Analytics, and we just released a one-click Matomo stack, so you can install your own powerful analytics platform to Origo Cloud in a couple of minutes.
2-Factor Authentication
You can now protect your Origo Cloud account using Gooogle Authenticator or Authy. All you have to do is enable it in your profile e.g. on Northcloud.dk og on Stabile.io, scan the QR code and you’re good to go.
Origo Cloud has always supported IP-based access control, which we strongly encourage everyone to use in addition to, of course, use strong passwords. We have now also implemented 2-factor authentication using TOTP / RFC 6238 for an added layer of security. This is handy if you would like to access your Origo Cloud account on the go, and don’t have access to e.g. corporate VPN.
One Click MongoDB Sharded Cluster
We just rolled a new stack for Stabile for those who use MongoDB and are tired of paying big bucks for using a managed DB service in the cloud and can’t be bothered to spend a weekend installing it. Install the stack as any of our other stacks, and you have a multi-node MongoDB sharded cluster up and running in about a minute with a nice managment UI. Add more shard nodes by simply adding servers to the stack.
Check it out here.
Introducing Origo DNS Services
Stabile installations that are linked with the Stabile Registry like, of course, Stabile Cloud, have always had basic DNS functionality built in, available through the API. Whenever you create a new network connection an A record is created in the default domain using the format “xx.xx.xx.xx.yyyyyyyy.default.domain”, where the x’s represent the connections public IPv4 address, and the y’s are the first 8 letters of yours engine’s uuid. For Stabile Cloud and new Stabile installations, the default domain is “uncloud.co”. This can be configured in /etc/stabile/config.cfg. Changing the default value requires that your domain zone is created on the Stabile name servers. Until now this was a manual process, where clients would ask us to create the zone.
Automating DNS and TLS Certificates with Kubernetes
Almost every app needs a web service backend, and every web service needs a domain name. To serve content from a domain name you need a TLS certificate.
While you still need to register and pay for a domain through a registrar like Godaddy or Domain.com, TLS certificates have been provided free of charge to anyone by Let’s Encrypt since 2016.
Origo Cloud Adds New Avalability Zone
Effective immediately Stabile Cloud is now available in a new availability zone engine2-dk-east, served from what we consider the ideal data center in the Copenhagen Area. We are extremely excited to have entered into an agreement with I2 about providing infrastructure and comptentencies for Stabile Cloud. The new environment is available at https://stabile.io/cloud or may be reached directly at https://engine2.stabile.io.
The data center we have chosen for our new availability zone is the data center that runs the Danish Internet Exchange point also known as the DIX. This location and in particular the company running it, I2, and the very competent personel that manage the infrastructure at the location, ensure a very high level of availability and uptime, as well as second-to-none network bandwith and network latency for clients in Denmark. Simply put – if the DIX is down, so is the Danish Internet. The historically very high stability of the DIX gives us confidence, that Stabile Cloud with this added location can deliver even better connectivity, availability and stability to our clients.
