Happy New Year, everybody!
In this first post of 2020, I would like to indulge in a review of the last year for the OVHcloud blog.
A busy first year for the new OVHcloud blog
The OVHcloud blog was rebooted in January 2019. Our aim was to build a technical blog in English, use it as a platform for documenting some of the lessons we learn as we build the best alternative cloud, and share them with the community.
The year ended with some great news for us, because the OVHcloud blog was named as one of the top 5 most active French tech blogs in 2019 alongside our friends Criteo, Algolia, Sqreen and Dailymotion. Not bad for our first year!
We published 53 posts (a little over our initial target of one post per week). The subjects were very diverse, from infrastructure to intellectual property, from our vision of the cloud to server water-cooling. But we always kept a main focus on technical matters, for a technical audience.
What did we talk about?
The most commonly-explored subjects were:
- Kubernetes
- Infrastructure
- Metrics & Observability
- DevOps & Automation
- Machine learning
- Dedicated servers
- Storage
Some highlights
We feel really proud of all the posts we published last year. We feel that the diversity of subject matters, contributors and technologies showcase the richness of OVHcloud teams’ expertise.
It’s always unfair to make a ranking, because bare audience metrics don’t necessarily correlate to a post’s interest or reach. However, let me showcase some of the most widely-read posts from this first year.
Disclaimer: it is not a strict ranking, as I am only putting one post per category into it
Getting external traffic into Kubernetes — ClusterIp, NodePort, Load Balancer, and Ingress
In this post, we tried to summarise some answers to a question that came up a lot as our customers began to explore our Managed Kubernetes service: How do I route external traffic into my Kubernetes service?
Part of the problem was the sheer number of possible answers, and the concepts needed to understand them, so in the post we tried to explain and illustrate those concepts.
Web hosting — why we decided to migrate three million websites
This was the first post in our ongoing Web Hosting infrastructure migration series, and one of the first posts where we began to unveil some details on the underlying infrastructure and technical choices for one of our biggest products (in every sense of the term): Web Hosting.
In the series, we tell the story of how we migrated more than three million websites and their associated databases from our Paris P19 datacenter to our Gravelines ones. And in this first post, Vincent explained why and how we chose to do this huge move.
How we’ve updated 850 vCenter in 4 weeks
Another large-scale migration tale, but this time a software one. In this blog post, Antoine explained how our Private Cloud teams migrated hundreds of VMware vCenter servers in a fully-automated way, without any impact for our customers.
It details how the migration was prepared, the tools that the team developed to automate it, the issues, and the collaboration with VMware teams — making it a good example of how transparency and communication are key values at the heart of the OVHcloud ethos.
Deep learning explained to my 8-year-old daughter
Both AI and machine learning were some of last year’s biggest buzzwords, and deep learning has also earned a special place under the spotlight.
In this post, Jean-Louis strives to demystify the topic, and show the concepts underlying the hype in a simple, clear and useful way. And I must say, he has done a great job of it!
Dedicated Servers: The new ranges are on their way!
Since the very beginning, Dedicated Servers have been a part of OVHcloud’s DNA. We manufacture our own servers, build our own datacenters and maintain strong, long-term relationships with other technological partners. We do all of this with one clear objective in mind — to deliver the most innovative solutions with the best price/performance ratio.
In this post, Yaniv announced the release of a new Dedicated Server range, using this as an opportunity to explain our philosophy on single-tenant physical servers, our production chain, and our global approach.
TSL: a developer-friendly Time Series query language for all our metrics
In the process of building and operating the OVHcloud Metrics Data Platform, our teams have developed a great deal of expertise in Time Series Database (TSDB) systems and their data analytics capabilities.
In this post, Aurélien told the story of the OVHcloud Metrics protocol, from OpenTSDB and PromQL to our internal adoption of WarpScript, and why we decided to create and open-source TSL, a Time Series Language aiming to build a Time Series data flow as code.
Water cooling: from innovation to disruption – Part I
OVHcloud isn’t just a software company — we are also an industrial one. One of the keys to our success is our ability to develop and promote innovation in both IT and industrial practices.
One of the most obvious examples is the idea of using water to cool our servers. This technology has allowed us to consistently increase server performance while reducing energy consumption in our datacenters.
In this post and its sequel, which were the first on the industrial side of OVHcloud, Ali told us the story of water-cooling at OVHcloud — from the first generation in 2003 to the latest prototypes. I bet you didn’t expect a cloud company to release a post like this!
And for 2020?
This year, we intend to continue the trend and publish even more technical content. We want to diversify it even further, with more contributors, more teams, more products, and more technologies.
Our goals are always the same: to give back to the community, showcase OVHcloud’s diversity and savoir-faire, and give our teams a platform for sharing the challenges they face and the solutions they implement.
We’d like to give a massive thanks to all of our contributors who create the content that we offer, our Content team for proofreading every post, and the OVHcloud Blog community that help us make it happen. And above all, thanks again to all of you for reading our blog, sharing it on social networks, and giving us your feedback.
Speaking of feedback, if you want to give us your opinion, suggest some topics you’d like to see us cover, or ask us for more details, please reach out to us (@OVHcloud) or directly to me (@LostInBrittany) via Twitter, and I will pass it on to the right teams.
Welcome to 2020. It’s going to be a blast!