OVHcloud Blog Archives - OVHcloud Blog

A year in review — the OVHcloud blog

Horacio Gonzalez — Fri, 08 Jan 2021 15:02:53 +0000

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!

A year in review — the OVHcloud blog

Horacio Gonzalez — Thu, 09 Jan 2020 14:42:42 +0000

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 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:

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.

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

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.

Welcome to 2020. It’s going to be a blast!