Happy New Year, everybody!
In this first post of 2021, I would like to indulge in a review of the last year for the OVHcloud blog.
A year like no other…
I feel like a lazy writer by typing a heading like that, it both seems trite and cliché. But honestly, I can’t find another way to start a 2020 retrospective, so much so this year has been unique.
The Covid-19 crisis has marked the whole year, and we at OVHcloud blog team have tried to be a relay for initiatives and messages from OVHcloud and its ecosystem to take part in the effort combat this healthcare crisis.
During the first lockdown, we talked about the #Open_solidarity initiative to offer free infrastructures to remote working, collaboration and healthcare hosting solutions for the duration of the COVID-19 crisis. We also gave some advice on protecting your IT infrastructure and the security issues raised by the sudden wave of remote working. We showcased some concrete examples, like the BigBluButton based solution used by the ISEN Ouest engineering school and by out internal training teams.
What did we talk about?
The most commonly-explored subjects were:
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
A journey through the wondrous land of Machine Learning series
In this series of posts, Solutions Architect Guillaume Ruty does a very practical, down to Earth, introduction to Machine Learning by using a scenario easy to relate to: how Machine Learning could have helped him estimate the price of the apartment he bought; what tools he would need to do that, how he would proceed, and what difficulties he might encounter.
In the first post, Did I get ripped off?, he does a naïve implementation of the Machine Learning process, and show how the results are aberrant, in the second one, “Can I really buy a palace in Paris for 100,000€?”, he explains why and proposes some solutions.
The Bastion series
In this series, our Head of Security Tools Squad, Stéphane Lesimple, describes our The Bastion security infrastructure, the constraints, the features, and how and why we decided to release it as open source last Fall. The series of articles offers a good peek to how we manage the access to our servers.
A public and participative roadmap for our Public Cloud!
Last December we released the roadmap for our Public Cloud. Maxime Hurtrel, Cloud Native Services Product Manager, explains in the post why and how we decided to
The Agile Telemetry series
A series of posts about Agility, in the OVHcloud way. Pragmatism, automation, metrics and a dose of plain old good sense allied to the Agile principles to build an Agile methodology that simply works.
The Self-heal at Webhosting series
With almost 6 000 000 websites hosted on more than 15 000 servers, the OVHcloud Webhosting SRE team manage lots of alerts during their working day. In these posts, the SRE team explain how they have been the self-healing, a set of tools to help them in their tasks.
An old favorite
Looking at the blog stats for 2020, I was pleasantly surprised to find an oldie but goodie, a post from 2019 that is still one off our most read post (and very highly placed in search engine searches):
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.
Not only a tech 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. But during 2020 we have also added some post that, even if less strictly technical, we believe interesting for our readers. In these posts we talks about our strategy, our position, our culture and our values, about all the factors that make OVHcloud a particular actor in the Cloud ecosystem.
In February we published a post by our founder Octave Klaba, If I were an American, exposing our vision and our values, and how they reflect in everything we do. Later he completed the vision in another post, Toward the Democratisation of Premium Bare Metal Cloud.
In May, our CEO Michel Paulin wrote a post on OVHcloud’s commitment to investing and building trust for the future and one of the concrete actions towards that objective, the Open Trusted Cloud catalog of trusted solutions.
In June, we shared The Forrester Wave™ report that classed OVHcloud as a Leader in the European Hosted Private Cloud market.
During Summer, we published Privacy Shield: Invalidation, explaining the context and meaning of this much-awaited ruling.
Just before our OVHcloud Ecosystem Experience, we published The customer’s role in data center eco-responsibility, where we discussed in an open way about eco-responsibility, energy consommation, innovation and transparency.
In November, we published 4 Programs to Succeed Together, where we showcased some of our ecosystem oriented programs: OVHcloud Partner Program, OVHcloud Startup Program, Open Trusted Cloud and OVHcloud Marketplace
That month we also talked about data sovereignty, and the impacts of the choice of a cloud provider, and how this choice has needs to be aligned with the long term strategy of companies.
And to end the year, we published a post about innovation, patents and our commitment to open innovation and open source.
Last but not least, OVHcloud is Guriosity’s sponsor of the month
Here at OVHcloud blog team, we are happy to be sponsors of Guriosity, our favorite French tech blog aggregator.
Guriosity is a curated aggregator of technical articles from almost 70 tech blogs by French companies. The site shows the posts, classed into categories, and they also have a weekly newsletter that showcases some of the most interesting posts.
And to celebrate this sponsoring, we will be giving some vouchers every week of the month to the readers of Guriosity newsletter, to allow them to discover some of our products.
And for 2021?
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 2021!