News

We’ve created a third availability zone named eu-west-1c in our region for you to use. Why should I use three zones? Using three zones is recommended to create an optimal multi-site failover cluster. Network problems can cause serious issues between cluster nodes. When a subset of nodes is unable to communicate with one another but continue to operate independently, data can become out of sync. To prevent this “split brain” situation a quorum, majority vote, is established authorising only one subset of nodes to continue operations, providing safe automatic failover.

Next week, we’re finally fulfilling a promise long overdue. We’re delivering a new availability zone for the Fuga platform. As part of the preparation of a new Fuga region in our second data center, we’ve done a lot of work on our network configuration. Part of these changes is a rename of the current region to eu-west-1 and creating two new availability zones: eu-west-1a and eu-west-1b. These will replace the current zone ams, which will be phased out.

It’s been a fantastic year for us at Fuga. Ever since launching in September 2015, we’ve managed to grow steadily throughout 2016. We are very happy with the stability and performance of the Fuga platform. One of the main goals we set ourself when we started out, was keeping up with OpenStack’s six-monthly release cycle. We never want to be more than one version behind of the most current stable release.

As mentioned in our OpenStack Mitaka upgrade liveblog the compute node upgrade was postponed. We’re happy to announce that we’ve finished the full process, without any significant downtime. As a result of this upgrade the Fuga platform is now completely upgraded to the OpenStack Mitaka release. With this upgrade we took the last step to enable live migrations so we can narrow the impact on the availability during future maintenance windows.

We’re happy to announce that today we’ve removed the beta label for the load balancer functionality in the dashboard, meaning we have officially taken it into production and can offer official support. The Fuga load balancer functionality allows you to quickly create HTTP, HTTPS or TCP based load balancing pools, add member servers to them and configure monitors to define failovers. If you haven’t used the functionality yet, you can find it in the Horizon dashboard under ‘Network’ -> ‘Load Balancers’.

Today, Thursday 8 September, we will perform major software maintenance on the Fuga platform. We will be upgrading the Fuga platform to the OpenStack Mitaka release. This concerns all components, including those related to networking, the dashboard and the APIs. The maintenance will start at 07:00 CEST and will be ongoing throughout a large part of the day. The timetable is as follows: Phase 1. 07:00 – 08:00 CEST – Storage upgradePhase 2.

Fuga platform development For the past two months, we’ve started performing updates and implementing new features in bi-weekly sprints instead of longer development cycles. The results of these sprints aren’t always immediately apparent to our Fuga users, as some of them are updates for stability or preparations for future functionality. We’re developing and testing them at our test and staging environments, and roll them out into production when they’re deemed stable enough.

The twice-annual OpenStack Summit wrapped up last month in Austin, Texas. It brought together 7,500 developers, users, and other open source cloud enthusiasts from around the globe (for comparison: the very first OpenStack Summit also took place in Austin, in July 2010, and attracted 75 attendants). Our managing director Paul Bankert was present in Austin to stay closely informed on new developments and trends in OpenStack, as well as to discover what’s on the development horizon for the next OpenStack Release (Newton).

Two years after the previous Long Term Support (LTS) release of Ubuntu – 14.04 Trusty Tahr – it’s time to move on to version 16.04, Xenial Xerus. This LTS was released on the 20th of April 2016 by Canonical and is now available in our Fuga Glance image library. While new Ubuntu Desktop and Server releases appear every six months, LTS versions are released every two years, and are supported by Canonical for five years after release.

This week, the OpenStack Summit is taking place in Austin, Texas. The OpenStack Summit is the most important OpenStack gathering, taking place every 6 months. Thousands of developers, cloud administrators, operators and decision makers attend the conference to discuss the current state and future of OpenStack. It’s actually two events in one: The OpenStack Conference and the OpenStack Ops & Design Summit. At the OpenStack Conference, industry leaders and other businesses present and discuss their use cases and share their experience with the OpenStack community.

Although there are a zillion possible uses for Fuga and the OpenStack platform, some are more evident than others. The flexibility and scalability of OpenStack, combined with the many features of the APIs, creates an ideal environment for application development and (automated) deployment. This is evidenced by quite a significant percentage of our beta-testers and early adopters being software development companies, like Ambrero Software B.V.. Besides technical features, there are also business considerations why you would want to switch to a public cloud platform instead of hosting at one or several (managed or shared) hosting providers.

Today, we performed the upgrade of the Fuga platform to the Liberty release of OpenStack. It was a project that had been delayed for some time because we had to overcome more difficulties than we expected in our testing and staging environments and these needed to be resolved before putting anything into production. These issues have all been resolved. We have successfully upgraded the live platform today. However, this too, took a little longer than we had anticipated.

We’ve updated the images in Fuga’s Glance image library. For all supported operating system images, the latest updated version has been uploaded and made available for use. We’ve also cleaned out some older images. For all operating system versions, there is now only a single image, which is the most up-to-date version. Instances based on older versions of the image aren’t affected and can be updated manually to the latest version by applying system updates.

On March 8, we will again organize a public cloud workshop at our office in Alkmaar. Like our first workshop last December, this workshop is aimed at users who are just getting started with the public cloud or are simply interested in what Fuga has to offer. The workshop in December was a success and, because we’ve received more demand since, we decided to reprise the workshop. We’ve updated the content based on the feedback we received, which should make this edition even better.

Last month, the European Union and the United States reached a new agreement on European data protection. The agreement, which goes by the name EU-US Privacy Shield, replaces the old Safe Harbor agreement, which was repealed by the European Commission at the end of 2015. However, the new agreement has not yet been officially ratified, a process that will probably take months. But what does this mean for your organization?

This notification concerns scheduled maintenance on the Fuga platform which will take place on Tuesday 23 February from 00:01 until 04:00 CET. Google and Red Hat have released a patch for a critical security vulnerability in the widely used GNU C library (glibc). The leak allows an attack, whereby, through a stack-based buffer overflow, arbitrary code can be executed. More information about the vulnerability can be found here: https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2015-7547 Due to the seriousness of this issue, we have decided to patch this vulnerability during a maintenance window scheduled ahead of our regular maintenance windows.

There are three ways to interact with your Fuga OpenStack environment: through the Horizon web interface, using the OpenStack CLI tools and directly from your application using a RESTful API. Using Horizon is by far the easiest, but also the most restrictive in terms of possible automation. Using the CLI tools gives you more options, and the most possibilities can be gained by directly interacting with the API from within your application.

Last week, we updated and improved our cost overview page within the ‪‎OpenStack‬ dashboard. From now on, it’s very easy to view your monthly costs, interactively divided by compute, storage and network. Besides this it’s possible to view a forecast for the next month. Visit your dashboard to experience the improvements or create a Fuga account today.

2016 has just started, but we can already tell you that we have many exciting things planned for its first three months. For example: OpenStack Liberty We’re working hard on the implementation of the latest OpenStack release (Liberty) to our production environment. We’d hoped to have the upgrade in place by now, but ran into unforeseen problems when testing the upgrade on our staging environments. This version has hundreds of new features and improvements, which you can find at the OpenStack website.

Yesterday, the OpenSSH project reported a client side vulnerability affecting OpenSSH versions 5.4 to 7.1. The vulnerability could cause an SSH client to leak key information, potentially exposing users to man-in-the-middle attacks. The vulnerability could allow a malicious SSH server to make the OpenSSH client leak memory contents, including data such as private keys. The vulnerability exists only after a client has successfully authenticated with a malicious SSH server. The vulnerability only exists in the client, not the server software itself.

On February 16 we will organize an intermediate level workshop with the subject ‘working with OpenStack API’s’. The workshop will take place at our office in Alkmaar and starts at 16:00 hrs. On March 8, we will organize another beginner course; ‘Start working with OpenStack’. We are also working on an advance level course, which will take place in Q2.