tl;dr: On March 21th 2022 the Cellar C1 cluster will reach its end of life. So we ask you to perform a migration to a newer cluster Cellar, which will also improve performance. The C1 cluster did not accept new add-ons since the 20th January 2019.

In fact, data need to be migrated from this old add-on to a new Cellar add-on. Newly created Cellar C2 add-ons come with various improvements :

• A better S3 protocol support (including the AWS V4 signature)
• Improved upload and download performances (x3 for upload, x2 for download)
• Improved resilience and availability of your data (Data is now replicated across two datacenters more than 20km apart)

How to migrate my data?

We can help you to migrate your data by syncing it directly on our side. To do that, reach the support and include in your message source and destination add-ons, including the buckets to migrate. The support team is here to help.

If you wish to migrate on your side, or at least keep your buckets synchronized, we built a simple tool to help you: Cellar migration tool.
You can run this tool as many times as you need. It will only synchronize objects that are different between the source and the destination buckets.
If you do not feel comfortable using it, you can also use the s3cmd sync command from the s3cmd tool.

If your application handle it, we encourage you to upload new objects as soon as possible to the new bucket. Then when you need to query that object, your application can query both buckets (old and new) to get it. You can also store the complete URL to make this easier. This should help you transition from one bucket to another without downtime.

Please note that we can't make sure that the buckets names you use will be available on the destination cluster. If you have a name conflict, please contact us and we will work something out.

A few days before the deadline, we will have short service brown-outs to remind customers that the service is going to be shut down. Those brown-outs will be announced on our status page a few days before. Make sure to subscribe to Status Updates to receive a notification.

What will happen if I can't do the migration?

If you can't do the migration or have any questions about it, we strongly recommend that you contact our support team via the console.
Before shutting down the cluster, we will backup your data and keep it for 6 months. Our support team will be able to provide you a download link or re-inject the data in a new bucket if you wish to recover it.

Following the high demand for large-sized instances, we have created many new plans. Check these out!

Since the introduction of MongoDB in 2013, things have changed a little bit. In the beginning, a few plans were proposed for MongoDB. Then we introduced some updates and new names for the plans (remember "Peanut", "Shamrock" etc. ?). Today, we have two major updates to release.

Numerous new plans

From five plans, this is nineteen plans of managed MongoDB now available on Clever Cloud. Most of our users start with a simple "dev" plan to try things at the beginning. But as their needs are getting bigger. Jumping from a simple 1GB plan to a 100GB (when only 5GB were needed) didn't make any sense.

Now with the new migration tool, moving from a bigger instance without a heavy price jump is easier.

Encrypted databases

Now you can ask for encrypted at rest databases! The add-on file system can be encrypted using LUKS. The encryption mode is XTS, which is reputed to be more resistant to watermarking attacks.

To get your MongoDB encrypted at rest, ask the support team. A UI will be soon available to make this option automatic. Stay tuned for more add-ons! ✌️

For a long time the only way to configure an FS Bucket for your application was to create a buckets.json file in ./clevercloud/ and specify the configuration in there. Not very Immutable Infrastucture friendly. It ends today.

Because you had to write a file in your code for a specific application, it made your code repository tied to a particular application. Sure there was a workaround with the apps field that allowed us to whitelist applications for each buckets. But it is still more painful than it should be.

Well starting today you can configure FS Buckets using environment variable. Here's what you need to add:

CC_FS_BUCKET=/path/to/folder:bucket_host

So if you have the following file:

[
  {
    "bucket_host": "bucket-c65762b6-4086-4c99-84b0-23eb85695809-fsbucket.services.clever-cloud.com",
    "folder": "/sites/default/files"
  }
]

You can delete it and replace it with the environment variable CC_FS_BUCKET=/sites/default/files:bucket-c65762b6-4086-4c99-84b0-23eb85695809-fsbucket.services.clever-cloud.com.

If you have multiple buckets you can use multiple variables like so:

CC_FS_BUCKET=/path/to/folder:bucket_host
CC_FS_BUCKET_0=/path/to/folder:bucket_host
CC_FS_BUCKET_10=/path/to/folder:bucket_host

At Clever Cloud, we've started using microservices before it was cool™. Today we're excited to launch service dependencies, to simplify microservices management.

The microservices graph

When you ditch your monolith and go full microservices, your application becomes a graph of loosely coupled microservices.

For instance, an typical service API can depend on:

• an auth microservice to validate requests
• a notification gateway to send notification

In turn, the notification gateway can depend on:

• an email gateway
• a push notification gateway

So you have a graph of services, each with its own lifecycle (eg dev, staging, production). So if you want to use a different email gateway from your staging API, you need to have in turn a specific notification gateway. To make a test in one project, you need to modifiy code in all its dependency chain. Uncool

Service dependencies

On Clever Cloud, you already know how to link applications to their dependencies on the fly, without touching code or fidling with config files: by linking an addon to your application, you let the addon inject its location and credentials so you don't have to handle it yourself. Service dependencies is just a generalization of the addon mechanism to any application.

Link applications

You can add dependencies to an application either from the CLI:

  clever service --alias api link-app notification-gateway

or from the console:

Exposed configuration

With addons, the exposed configuration is always the same. With applications, you can declare the configuration you want to expose to your dependents. To make an app expose configuration, you can either do it from the CLI:

  clever exposed-config --alias api set API_DOMAIN_NAME api.example.com

or from the console:

Note: every time you update the exposed configuration, dependent applications will be automatically redeployed.

Introducing Redis by Clever Cloud + Redsmin

Use cases

• Session storage: You can use Redis to track easily your users data on your app. Store the sessions in an easy way to keep users' data available for your stateless apps.
• Queuing jobs: Redis comes with interesting primitives like BLPOP, a blocking list pop primitive. This feature allows workers to wait for jobs to get pushed onto the queue.
• Caching: Redis is well known for its caching capabilities. If you have assets or data that are frequently used, Redis may be a good way to serve them in an efficient way.

Earlier this year we’ve promised some great news. Here we are: we’re proud to announce our first external add-on : Redsmin!

What are add-ons? Add-ons help you build and enhance your applications, with things such as databases, monitoring, storage, email, etc. If you are a clever cloud customer, you’re probably using one of the add-ons we provide. Postgres, Mysql, MongoDB.

Clever Cloud considers these add-ons as application resources: when you provision an add-on, you are billed according to the plan you’ve chosen.

Today, we’re excited to introduce Redsmin as the first external add-on on Clever Cloud. Why Redsmin?

Redsmin will help you being more efficient with every aspect of Redis, the famous highly performant, in memory, data-structure server. With Redsmin you will be able to administrate and to monitor in real-time any of your Redis servers both hosted on the cloud or in your local network in an easy way. Nightmares debugging Redis servers in production are over, Redsmin will now have your back!

This new addon is the first in a long list of planned releases. We’re making our best to provide more choice every month.