That’s why we’re so excited to announce our new partnership with Epitech 🥳, a school renowned for helping talented students learn.

From Classroom to Career

This new partnership is our promise to help students succeed, giving them the tools and experience they need to build great things. Here’s how we’ll be helping the Epitech community:

• Fun Hackathons: We’ll host hackathons where students can team up to solve real problems and be creative, turning good ideas into actual projects. 💡

• Great Internships: Epitech students can come work with our teams. Our internships offer a real chance to use what they’ve learned in class and to get a solid start on their careers.

• Hands-on Training: Our experts will run special workshops for students. They’ll learn the latest tech skills directly from the people who use them firsthand every day.

• Help for Students: New ideas often start with research. We’ll give Epitech’s students special access to public cloud services on beneficial terms. We want to help them turn their ideas into reality, faster! 🔬

This Is Just the Beginning

Our partnership with Epitech is a huge first step for us, but we’re just getting started.
OVHcloud aims to team up with more schools in the future, as we believe it’s imperative for companies and schools to work together! By supporting students everywhere, we help them become the strong leaders of tomorrow.

Schools Are Our Future

We’re deeply convinced of this simple truth: the future is in the hands of today’s students.

In an ever-evolving landscape, building a sustainable and innovative future depends on our ability to develop and master our own technologies.  And in today’s geopolitical context, where questions of digital independence and data control are more critical than ever, giving young talents the means to innovate locally is not just an opportunity — it’s a necessity.

After all, technical sovereignty doesn’t start in boardrooms, it starts in schools. By providing students with the skills, tools, and mindsets to design and control their own digital solutions, we are actively contributing to a stronger, more resilient ecosystem. By investing in education, we’re investing in our future – ensuring that the next generation of engineers, developers, and visionaries have the opportunity to build a better, more technologically advanced world. In this world of tomorrow, Europe and its partners remain free, innovative, and sovereign.

To everyone at Epitech, we can’t wait to start working with you. Let’s build the future together!

In an era where digital security is paramount, blockchain technology emerges as a transformative force for cloud services. Offering unparalleled transparency, immutability, and trust, blockchain stands to revolutionize how we secure our data and transactions in the cloud. For our clients and partners, this means an elevated layer of security through immutable audit trails, guaranteed data integrity, and innovative approaches to identity management. By decentralizing security, blockchain technology not only enhances protection but also redefines trust in the digital space.  

As we navigate this journey together, the integration of blockchain into cloud services promises to fortify our digital defenses and pave the way for a more secure and trustworthy digital ecosystem. 

Blockchain: a game-changer for healthcare and finance sectors 

Widely known as a disruptive technology with the potential to transform many industries, blockchain has evolved much over the years. In the early days, blockchain was primarily used for cryptocurrency transactions. Today, blockchain is being used by a multitude of businesses and organizations for a broad spectrum of applications including supply chain management, healthcare and finance. The global blockchain market is expected to grow at a compound rate (CAGR) of 87.7% from 2023 to 2030¹. The growth of blockchain is propelled by a number of factors including: 

• Rising demand for secure and transparent transactions 
• Need for a more efficient way to track and manage data 
• Potential for blockchain to disrupt traditional industries 

Cloud computing can offer the foundational infrastructure that is needed to support blockchain applications. Here, we explore the challenges that partners encounter during the deployment of blockchain solutions for their clients, and how OVHcloud can help partners to overcome these challenges. 

Decentralization: enhancing your blockchain technology 

Decentralization is a key feature of blockchain technology and refers to the distribution of nodes across a network. However, any hosted node can be vulnerable to attacks from malicious actors targeting any hosting service, making it difficult to defend. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, a common security threat in blockchain that have caused significant disruption to blockchain networks, can disrupt and prevent legitimate users from conducting transactions leading to financial losses for businesses that rely on its functionality.  

By default, all OVHcloud products are delivered with Anti-DDoS protection. We operate our own large distributed global network that provides enough throughput to mitigate attacks, no matter where they originate. Partners can also customize protection rules via the control panel if they have additional requirements. As such, OVHcloud’s partners are reassured by our commitment to ensure optimal security for their infrastructure, hosted with OVHcloud. 

In addition, the decentralised nature of blockchain networks makes them reliant on multi-locality of a cloud service provider. With OVHcloud’s 37 datacenters globally, partners can leverage on OVHcloud solutions to scale their resources as needed when their network grows, without having to worry about managing the hardware. Blockchain platforms are designed to be scalable, meaning they can be easily expanded to accommodate more nodes. We help partners to quickly adapt their infrastructure to meet changing demand. 

Costs: how to make the most out of OVHcloud best price-performance ratio? 

The cost of setting up and maintaining a blockchain network can be significant, and typically includes cost of blockchain application development, hardware and initial node deployment. Ongoing maintenance costs involve hardware maintenance, security and compliance adaptation. OVHcloud offers pay-as-you-go pricing to help clients reduce cost and save on unused resources. We provide a transparent pricing structure to allow partners to budget efficiently and keep their clients well informed.  

Depending on the blockchain network, ingress and egress traffic may be high if the network is used to process a large number of transactions. Simply put, ingress is the flow of data into the cloud while egress is the flow of data out of the cloud. OVHcloud does not charge ingress and egress traffic for all data moving in and out of our European and North American data centres.  Our performance/price ratio is among the best in the market, enabling partners to stay competitive with predictable pricing structure. 

Compliance 

Compliance in blockchain is an ongoing process. As laws and regulations evolve, organizations need to be prepared to adapt to the changes. Some of the most common compliance-related issues that arise with blockchain technology are data security and data sovereignty.  

We certify our solutions to the highest security standards to demonstrate our commitment to data security and sovereignty. In sectors such as supply chain, banking and finance, and healthcare, where blockchain is finding new uses, we are taking a tailored compliance approach to meet the specific needs of these industries. For instance, ISO 27001/27017/27018, ISO 27701, ANSSI SecNumCloud, PCI DSS and GDPR.  

Partnerships: Use OVHcloud Know-How to Leverage Your Business 

At OVHcloud, we work with partners like Zeeve DeepTech which has a wealth of expertise in blockchain technology. Zeeve DeepTech helps clients with their enterprise-grade automation platform that provides deployment, monitoring and management of blockchain nodes and networks while OVHcloud offers the underlying infrastructure that businesses need to run the blockchain applications on. 

As blockchain technology develop, OVHcloud will continue to work with partners to harness the full potential of the technology and address any challenges they may face.  

Sources: 

1. https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/blockchain-technology-market 
   
   Find out more on blockchain!
   Our dedicated web page: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/learn/what-is-blockchain/
   Our labs page: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/case-studies/bware-labs/
   Our other blog post on How To Use Cloud to Solve Blockchain Challenges: https://blog.ovhcloud.com/how-to-use-cloud-to-solve-blockchain-challenges/
   Our Whitepaper: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/powering-your-blockchain-technology-with-cloud/

The challenge behind a fully managed service

Readers unfamiliar with our orchestration service and/or GPUs may be surprised that we did not yet offer this integration in general availability. This lies in the fact that our team is focused on providing a totally managed experience, including patching the OS (Operating System) and Kubelet of each Node each time it is required. To achieve this goal, we have built and maintained a single hardened image for the dozens of flavors, in each of the 10+ regions.
Based on the experience of selected beta users, we found that this approach doesn’t always work for use cases that require a very specific NVIDIA driver configuration. Working with our technical partners at NVIDIA, we found a solution to leverage GPUs is a simple way that allows fine tuning such as the CUDA configuration for example.

NVIDIA to the rescue

This Keep-It-Simple-Stupid (KISS) solution relies on the great work of NVIDIA building and maintaining an official NVIDIA GPU operator. The Apache 2.0 licensed software uses the operator framework within Kubernetes. It does this to automate the management of all NVIDIA software components needed to use GPUs, such as NVIDIA drivers, Kubernetes device plugin for GPUs, and others.

We ensured it was compliant with our fully maintained Operating System (OS), based on a recent Ubuntu LTS version. After testing it, we documented how to use it on our Managed Kubernetes Service. We appreciate that this solution leverages an open source software that you can use on any compatible NVIDIA hardware. This allows you to guarantee consistent behavior in hybrid or multicloud scenarios, aligned with our SMART motto.

Here is an illustration describing the shared responsibility model of the stack:

All our OVHcloud Public customers can now leverage the feature, adding a GPU node pool to any of their existing or new clusters. This can be done in the regions where both Kubernetes and T1 or T2 instances are available: GRA5, GRA7 and GRA9 (France), DE1 (Germany) (available in the upcoming weeks) and BHS5 (Canada) at the date this blog post is published.
Note that GPUs worker nodes are compatible with all features released, including vRack technology and cluster autoscaling for example.

Having Kubernetes clusters with GPU options means deploying typical AI/ML applications, such as Kubeflow, MLFlow, JupyterHub, NVIDIA NGC is easy and flexible. Do not hesitate to discuss this feature with other Kubernetes users on our Gitter Channel. You may also have a look to our fully managed AI Notebook or AI training services for even simpler out-of-the box experience and per-minute pricing!

Our various programs are the concrete embodiment of this conviction: grow and succeed together, while ensuring everyone remains in control of their data, innovates, and thrives in freedom.

OVHcloud Partner Program

Our partner program, deployed internationally, has been designed to support the digital transformation of companies and organizations. This year, against a backdrop of accelerating digital transformation due to the global pandemic, our collaboration with this powerful network has become even more structured.

These partners are very complementary to our business, as they are high added value resellers or service providers that wish to support their customers as they migrate to OVHcloud infrastructures. They provide advice, support expertise, or add their own technological building block. To support our partners in achieving their missions, we provide training, sales support and technical support for our solutions. In recent months, 300 partners have been trained through more than 50 sessions delivered by our experts.

In accordance with our commitments, OVHcloud’s Partner Program is non-exclusive. Our partners retain their freedom and can continue to collaborate with other cloud players on the market. But the offers or services they provide to our own customers through our partner portal must be based on our trusted cloud. We need to ensure that our customers, who would benefit from support from a partner, have their infrastructure compliant with their local regulations, and that their data remains sovereign.

For partners, joining this program represents a competitive advantage, as their customers are becoming increasingly aware of how to use a cloud that respects freedom and citizens’ rights. We also offer our partners localized support, specific to their geographical area, through our dedicated teams. They can also work within the program, which includes 3 different levels, and as many additional benefits for each. Following their growth, they have the opportunity to move from Standard to Advanced partners (one-third of our partners currently), to Strategic partners (which we will be opening very soon, for those who support large companies). This powerful network of partners contributes daily to strengthening our global ecosystem and spreading our shared values.

OVHcloud Startup Program

The startup support program was created to encourage the start-up of innovative projects. By supporting them from the earliest stages of their development, we help reveal their most disruptive aspects. This program is international in order to meet the high demand in all the countries where we are present. We support nearly 2,000 startups in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. This year, the program has been strengthened by opening up to scale-ups and diversifying its support offer. They can get financial support in the form of credits for our cloud infrastructure, technological advice to support their growth, and mentoring to support their business development. We want to act as a boost for these startups and scaleups by contributing to the development of their network and their reputation. In return, we benefit from their feedback, since they are often the first users of our new products and participate in our R&D cycle.

Our program stands out in the market for its lack of exclusivity, and we do not use technological locking (usually imposed for this type of support). When exiting the program, we do not force startups or scaleups to use our cloud infrastructures, nor do we take part in their capital. This unrestricted model guarantees them high reversibility and technological interoperability but by choosing to continue operating on our infrastructures means keeping control of their data.
This program supporting innovation is fundamental to the development of ecosystems of local entrepreneurs who share our values, in each of the countries in which we operate.

Open Trusted Cloud

In 2020, to address the confinement situation in multiple countries, we temporarily deployed an initiative called Open Solidarity. Many of our partners and customers providing remote working, education and healthcare solutions have joined this solidarity effort to help companies digitalize their data. With their trusted cloud-based solutions, they were able to support the digital transformation of companies concerned with protecting the security and confidentiality of their data while safeguarding their competitiveness.

Continuing this operation, we have developed the Open Trusted Cloud program to meet a real customer need: be able to easily identify solutions based on a trusted, open and interoperable cloud, The “Open Trusted Cloud” label acts as a true differentiator in their market, guaranteeing their commitment to respecting freedom and citizens’ rights.

Thanks to a number of contributors, we are continuing to develop this portfolio of labelled solutions, which are able to provide the best guarantees in terms of data protection. And we encourage all companies that share our commitments to join the Open Trusted Cloud program to spread the ethical cloud label around the world and use it as a lever for growth.

OVHcloud Marketplace

Recently launched and only available in France for the moment, the OVHcloud Marketplace was created to support the growth of SaaS and PaaS publishers hosted on our infrastructures. Today, it encompasses more than 250 solutions based on our trusted cloud. They are completely complementary to our solutions, and meet all companies’ needs for turn-key solutions such as collaborative suites, emailing, website creation, company social networks, cyber security solutions…

Beyond a catalogue of digital solutions, a community of sellers, united by the same commitments, is taking shape. A collaborative platform has just been deployed to unite the sales community and create synergies by facilitating exchanges, whether it is the sales community between itself to discuss technical convergence, common commercial interests, or even alliance on certain calls for tenders or our experts to support our new infrastructure solutions, features and services. In the context of the current health crisis, some of them have also spontaneously offered their preferential tariff solutions in solidarity to support hard-hit professionals and especially traders (you can find them in the solidarity selection section) .

As with all our other programs, we have adopted an alternative approach to the standard marketplaces on the market. No commercial exclusivity is imposed on our sellers, and we do not charge commission. Only a 3% transaction fee is charged to participate in the management costs inherent to the platform. Each of our sellers is also certified, so that all OVHcloud final customers in the OVHcloud Marketplace can benefit from secure transactions.

The OVHcloud Marketplace will be progressively deployed globally in 2021, to bring our visibility as a European cloud leader and global presence to our entire ecosystem. Pre-registration is open for all interested sellers outside of France.

To summarize

Like our ecosystem, our 4 programs are rich and diverse. Their growth is supported by market awareness for a more responsible cloud and by the commitment of each company that adheres to these programs. These companies want to drive change and make strong commitments to a cloud that is more ethical and respectful of citizens’ rights, particularly with regard to data protection. Our OVHcloud Ecosystem Experience, through many testimonials that you can find here, has proven that this ecosystem can grow in collaboration and trust. We are continuing our common efforts towards an ecosystem open to responsible innovation and respect for users, and we will continue to develop our programs to serve this belief.

Let’s consider countries, companies — entire sectors, like the healthcare sector — which is so severely affected right now. What are the concrete consequences of concepts such as resilience, sovereignty, and trust?

The digital sector has by no means been spared from these unprecedented challenges, and there is good reason for this. In just a few days, radical transformations were imposed across the globe. Our working lives froze, and completely transformed at the same time. For better or for worse, digital tools are undeniably playing a vital role in this forced transformation. With remote working, remote teaching, alert systems, remote healthcare, online shopping, and much more, there are so many challenges and transformations that can be sudden.

Day after day, we are discovering that this accelerated digital transformation comes with many advantages, but it also comes with challenges — and even risks.

Protecting our freedom of choice

The jungle of digital solutions is so rich and overabundant, and lines of trust can be particularly hard to read — especially for a society that has never needed so many of these solutions before. The lively debate over traceability in contact tracing tools, like TraceTogether in Singapore, demonstrates that citizens are questioning the ethics of these digital tools. And they are right to do so.

• Where is our healthcare data stored, who can access it, and what can they use it for?
• Do we just have to accept that a select few players can sometimes keep their ground rules completely secret?

The recent scandals on the abusive usage of our personal data by social network providers show that these scenarios do not just exist in sci-fi shows like Black Mirror — they are already a reality.

At a time where many countries in Europe have lost control over their production and provisioning chain for equipment like masks and antibiotics, it is evident that the world of data is struggling with the same risks of dependency.

Initiatives for a trusted European digital ecosystem

At OVHcloud, like our customers and most of the other companies we work with, we believe that the ability to exercise our digital sovereignty is key for our freedom of choice. It is important for keeping control over our future, maintaining job security, and even keeping our way of life. These are all the challenges of a trusted cloud — a cloud guaranteeing European countries that strategic data is protected for their states, companies and citizens.

We strongly believe that in Europe, we must build a powerful ecosystem of players that share the same values and respect for data, reversibility, openness and transparency.

This belief is shared by a number of business owners, and by services across the European continent. The latest speeches from the European Commission demonstrate that this feeling is shared, so we need to take action.

There are different initiatives in place already; I’ll give three examples of the ones promoting digital sovereignty:

• Across Europe, there is the Gaia-X cloud project — a joint initiative from German and French public authorities, supported by their respective ecosystems. The goal of this cloud project is to define the axes of influence for a trusted European cloud. With integrators, manufacturers, players in the telecom sector, and institutions, this European ecosystem exists and is united by a strong set of values.
• In France, there is the Industry Strategic Committee, known as the Comité Stratégique de Filière (CSF). It was initiated by the Ministry of Finance and Industry, with players such as Atos, Oodrive, Outscale, OVHcloud, Scaleway and many others confirming their commitment to developing trusted solutions. Integration players such as CapGemini, GFI, Sopra and Thales have also worked hard to offer alternative, trusted sovereign solutions.
• And in terms of business owners — we can look at the success of the call to action from the 09th April for better digital sovereignty in Europe and across the globe in future* (on the initiative of Raphael Richard (Néodia), Pascal Gayat (Les Cas d’OR du Digital, Les Pionniers du Digital), Matthieu Hug (Tilkal), and Alain Garnier (Jamespot)). It has been signed by more than 100 business owners (including Octave and myself, on behalf of OVHcloud) and proves how important it is to be conscious of these topics, and how collective engagement is a key part of taking action together.

These European solutions exist, they are outstanding, and their ingenuity makes them able to compete with more dominant players. But solidarity between public authorities, business owners and large groups will be one of the keys to success for solid digital sovereignty. Public demand, the demand of large European groups, cooperation between research institutes and large teaching centres with start-ups are also key factors for accelerating this ethical ecosystem.

Everyone has understood that now is the time to take action, rather than simply identify issues. Octave Klaba, Founder and Chairman of OVHcloud, has always worked hard to defend strong values, and has succeeded in creating a European champion company — the only European cloud player that is within the top 10 worldwide.

To be responsible, we must take action.

OVHcloud’s commitment to investing and building trust for the future

Investing in our trusted infrastructures: We are investing in our own network of 30 datacentres, and our own telecom network with more than 20TB of transit. We are also investing in two trusted datacentres situated in France, reserved for European players with the most critical data — our public services, hospitals, and cutting-edge industries. Our datacentres hold the very highest certifications in terms of security (HDS, SecNumCloud in progress, ISO/IEC 27001, 27017 and 27018, PCI DSS, etc.).

Investing in a responsible, resilient model: We design our own datacentres, build our servers in France, and prefer short supply paths. This model guarantees employment in northern France, and also offers both traceability and auditability for our hardware — as well as improved availability.

Investing in an energy-efficient model: For over 15 years, OVHcloud has been developing water-cooling technologies for its servers, massively reducing its building and operating costs, and drastically limiting its energy usage.

Investing in innovation: Our belief is that innovation should be used for values of trust, and respecting personal and company data. OVHcloud invests a lot in research and development for solutions, particularly open-source projects — and also working with others to build standards that guarantee interoperability for cloud infrastructures.

But beyond investing in our own technology, we must also build an ecosystem of players that share the same values and respect for data, reversibility, openness and transparency.

Open Trusted Cloud — a catalogue of trusted solutions

We are urging software and SaaS publishers to work with us and help with the emergence of a new initiative: Open Trusted Cloud.

This program has a simple goal — to build an ecosystem of SaaS and PaaS solutions, hosted in an open, reversible cloud that guarantees the physical location of data.

OVHcloud guarantees hosted solutions:

• The choice of location for the storage and processing of data, ensuring compliance with local European legislations.
• Compliance with the CISPE European “code of conduct” on Data Protection¹.
• Compliance with the “Code of Conduct” on data reversibility facilitated by the European Commission (SWIPO IaaS²)
• If required, compliance for healthcare data hosting (HDS certification) and financial data hosting (SOC/ACPR/EBA compliance and PCI-DSS certification) in France, and in a certain number of European countries.
• And in certain cases, if solutions are referenced by the right organisations, C2 hosting for state services in France.

This way, it will offer a common platform of competitive solutions, marked with a label that enables everyone to use the best software solutions in the world — all while remaining protected by a trusted, sovereign infrastructure.

Join our Open Trusted Cloud initiative, and together we will prove that the future can be aligned in harmony with our values!

1 https://cispe.cloud/code-of-conduct/

2 Code of Conduct for Data Portability and Cloud Service Switching for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Cloud services

Should it be for modernizing, or for building new applications, developers are called on to bring functionalities faster to market. However, many of them are still complaining that Ops are inefficient in providing the resources they need to deploy and run applications in production. While this leads to complexity, slowness and frustration – its productivity that’s most negatively affected. This is where Cloud 66 comes in.

What does Cloud 66 offer?

Cloud 66 provides solutions that enable developers to build, deploy, run and manage applications in any cloud, in a completely automated and streamlined fashion.  Using these solutions feels like having an in-house DevOps team that makes sure servers work for applications in production. Developers can just focus on writing code, and do not need to worry about taking care of the infrastructure. Cloud 66 has integrated OVHcloud as one the cloud infrastructure providers where applications can be deployed and run.

Why should I care?

As one of Cloud 66’s ambitions is to build simple infrastructure that adds value to startups all over the world, it was an obvious match to partner Cloud 66 with OVHcloud.

As a developer, Cloud 66 will make your life much easier. It simplifies application deployment by automating the provisioning, scaling and management of application environment and associated resources.

By deploying and running your application on OVHcloud, you will benefit from the most competitive, predictable prices for compute, storage and network resources. Note: for compute instances, traffic is included; so you will save a lot if your application gets great traction. As reversibility is one of our key values, you keep full control and ownership over your data, leveraging OVHcloud’s focus on data protection.

It works with your Ruby, Node or containerized applications

Let’s have a look at the practical elements – this helps demonstrate how straight-forward it is to deploy applications with Cloud 66.

First, ensure you have the following: 

• A Cloud 66 Account
• A Git Repo containing your application code
• An account at OVHcloud

Let’s say you are a developer of Ruby application. After selecting that you want to deploy the native application, you are asked to chose a framework. Due to its intuitive UI, it is likely that you will choose “Deploy Rails & Rack Frameworks”.

Provide information about your application

One very cool feature with Cloud 66, is that once you have provided information about your app, it analyses your code to assist you in the configuration of the runtime and associated resources.

Accessing your Git Repo

Cloud 66 supports both public and private Git repositories. If you’re using a private Git repository you’ll need to Add and approve the Cloud 66 public SSH key with your Git provider:

Defining your application

You are finally asked to enter your Git repo URL, branch to deploy, name for your app and an environment for deployment

Configuring your application

Once the analysis is complete you’ll see a yellow Information Box that you can use to verify that the analysis is correct.

Deploy your application on OVHcloud

To use OVHcloud as a target environment for deployment, just pick OVHcloud in the drop-down menu when selecting a cloud provider.

You need to select the API region (US, EU and CA are available). Note that this is not the region for the deployment, its your billing entity. E.g, if you registered an OVHcloud account in France: choose OVHcloud EU.

Enter your OVH project ID and create a name for your deployment target.

Finally, you can decide how you want to configure your Front end (Web) and Database Servers. They can be shared or deployed to separate servers.

Once it’s done, just click Deploy application, your application is deployed on your Public Cloud instances and your resources are provisioned dynamically by Cloud 66: You’re good to go!

Who is Cloud 66?

Cloud 66 is headquartered in San Francisco and London, whose mission it is to make developers more productive. Created in 2012, it serves more than 1000+ companies, in 120 countries. The company deploys apps 2 million times a day for thousands of developers around the world.

What’s next?

You can start right now creating your Cloud 66 account. To celebrate our partnership with Cloud 66, when you set up a Cloud 66 account, just use the code: Hello-OVHcloud and you will benefit from $66 free credits to use on Cloud 66.

We are planning a webinar on June, 30th for a deeper dive into Cloud 66 products, so you can see and learn how straight-forward it is to deploy your application with Cloud 66 at OVHcloud. Stay tuned!