Just about five years ago we lifted the covers of the service we had confidentially been preparing and running for early adopters. While it’s a short span in human time, in the tech business it’s already an era; to wit, technology which has now made its way into the standard toolbox of many companies, such as Docker, Ansible, Terraform did not even exist back then.
What was true then and still holds today is the need for an automation-focused public-cloud offering, providing a sound substrate to build applications free from potential government overreach.
We made a couple of initial architectural choices which defined the platforms, such as:
- Local storage for fast I/O
- A security-groups approach to network isolation
This quickly let Exoscale stand-out as a perfect platform for scalable infrastructrure design to host modern applications, but did require a substantial pedagogical effort on our part.
We covered a lot of ground since then, from putting user experience at the heart of our concerns and ensuring dealing with complex infrastructure concepts stayed a pleasant experience. We also gradually added features to serve more advanced use-cases: Object-Storage, Organizations, DNS Zone hosting, Anti-Affinity, Snapshots, Elastic IPs, Private Networks, as well as many small improvements and tooling support in the surrounding automation ecosystem. On the capacity front, we added tons of compute and storage capacity, as well as three additional zones in addition to our initial Geneva Datacenter: Zurich, Vienna, and Frankfurt.
Doing so allowed us to capture great traction in Switzerland and beyond, and we’re honored to serve computation in the research space, financial industry, health industry, and many more.
In that span of time, the tech world did not keep still and saw the fast adoption of container technology, as well as container orchestration platform. Container orchestration superseded more constrained PaaS offering for many and is making strides in companies of all sizes.
To better support these workloads, we undertook to write our own network orchestration controller, the foundation on which our Elastic IP addresses and Private networks are built. This foundation will be expanded this year to provide an even better environment for both enterprise applications and container orchestrators, with the release of:
- IPv6 support
- Managed Private Networks, to avoid manually configuring private network addresses
- IPsec gateways, for seamless routing to private networks
- A programmable load-balancer, as the secure front door to your workloads
- Identity management, for fine-grained control of API key access
- RHEL and Atomic OS, as new operating system options
- Custom OS images, to allow quick startup of cooked images
To top it all, we will adapt the price of our recently updated object store down to CHF 0.0198.- or 0.018 € per gigabyte per month in the coming days.
Infrastructure is not all about technology, and we understand how much our customers value safe and trusted partners. To that end, we are carrying out two initiatives in the first part of 2018:
- A certification process to ensure Exoscale is fully ISO-27001 compliant
- Self-service data-processing agreements to make GDPR-compliance a breeze for our customers
Through it all, we intend to continue entertaining you with even more quality content, and we hope the five coming years will be as exciting as the last 5 ones were!