Mid-May, at our team seminar, we realized that when we talk about Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), the "Serverless" trend, deployment automation, application maintenance, or just "Cloud", many of our interlocutors are confused.

PaaS, Serverless… Clever Cloud?

They wonder what it's all about, what it does in practice, and how it will change the way their teams are organized. If our customers are convinced, it is not always easy to get people beyond the "try it, adopt it" stage.

There are many reasons for this, but the main one is that these terms have most often been diverted from their original meaning, being used in all sorts of ways according to the needs of uninspired marketing teams. Over the years, we have seen players offering such services, allowing developers and ops to learn about them, without the rigor necessary to use them in production environments… or with complex offers, which can tend to lock them into a closed ecosystem.

The result is disappointing returns, which impact the image of our entire industry and can sometimes give the impression that PaaS "is not a serious business".

Simplify and automate, assisting humans

But we are serious. When Clever Cloud was founded, our primary goal was not only to offer a "clever" product to those who want to deploy applications and keep them operational. We wanted to create a technical solution that met the market standards, that was easy to learn, yet production-ready, even in case of a slashdot effect.

We also had to make it clear how necessary these tools were: to simplify teams' life, save time and focus on the essentials, get back to a situation where digital resources are densified, which has benefits both in financial and energy efficiency.

However, we still regularly hear that the trend towards PaaS or Serverless aims to make the "ops" profession disappear. In fact, behind what appears to be "No Ops", we are preaching "Not Only Ops", placing people where they are needed, where they bring expertise and create value.

This means offloading repetitive actions that can be automated, while reducing the complexity of tasks for both developers and ops, the mental load of managing their applications. How do you do this? By creating a platform where they simply work, constantly, in a secure environment, with simplified and automated update management.

To do this, we provide a set of runtimes, add-ons and solutions that allow teams to focus on the design of their applications and the way the different software bricks interact. This is accompanied by simplified deployment tools that can be integrated into continuous integration and development (CI/CD) chains. We also make application observability easy, so that our customers can always know what is going on and act accordingly.

This allows them to stay focused on their technical choices. They don't have to worry about infrastructure issues, initiating server configuration, deploying VMs when they think it's necessary, restarting everything in case of a problem, our tools are there for that. They allow us to do this on both our own and our partners' infrastructures, based on over a decade of historical knowledge in terms of adapting the operation of services and applications to the load. Resiliency and multi-cloud are thus at the heart of our technical and value promise.

Values and commitments

To help people better understand these issues, we have historically chosen to explain what we do and how we do it, from conferences to podcasts, from blog posts to discussions with the public sector or journalists. We regularly explain the motivations behind the use of our technical bricks, what makes the cloud work on a daily basis, virtualization and containers, security, the points to watch out for, etc.

Above all, we have always wanted to be involved in the future of the ecosystem, whether by regularly participating in events, leading debates, joining organizations that defend our values such as Euclidia or the Open Internet Project (OIP), or by associating with French partners such as 2CRSi/Green Data or Kalray.

In this way, we have always advocated an open approach in our exchanges, but also by supporting open source projects, developing our own such as Sōzu or Biscuit, or seeking to work as a team with other European cloud service providers, editors and manufacturers.

More recently, we have also chosen to focus on more open hardware solutions, starting with those of the Open Compute Project (OCP). We are also exploring other avenues, such as open systems in the field of networking equipment, such as SONiC. One thing has always been our strength: talking truthfully.

Our first partner? Our customer

You could say that we are doing all this because "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together". But we are mainly in an increasingly unbalanced cloud market, where we are collectively facing players as giant as they are hegemonic, and we believe that it is through the federation of efforts, good will and by pooling our capacity for innovation that we will win.

Our challenge is not to resist but to grow together. And we are succeeding on our own scale. Clever Cloud is thus able to lead all these battles and carry out all these projects with a team that is now composed of about 40 people.

Most of them are developers, ops and engineers who are there to design and improve our product. A product designed, developed and implemented in France (for the most part in the West), guaranteeing European values of data respect, openness and sovereignty. A form of cloud craftsmanship at the service of the industrialization of your applications.

Choices and a course made possible because we remain independent. Our growth is not ensured by a race for investors who must be constantly reassured and pleased while waiting to sell the company. Instead, we have chosen to grow thanks to our customers who pay to use our tools. They are our strength, ensuring our ability to invest in a better and better product. They allow us to offer a viable and efficient alternative that they benefit from every day.

This is also why we make it a point of honor to ensure a high quality of support, with a dedicated team, constantly listening, but also a strong involvement of our developers and engineers to provide solutions to those who trust us.

We have doubled in size in less than a year, strengthened our management team, reorganized and continue to recruit, not only developers. Because our platform would be nothing without the people who make our company what it is every day, who carry its word, who go out to meet our customers, and who make Clever Cloud a unique human and technical adventure.

Making Clever Cloud better known

One of our challenges, in addition to improving our platform, launching new features and announcing partnerships, is to make our business better known to DIY enthusiasts and developers as well as to more experienced profiles, but also to decision-makers and to those for whom the cloud is a somewhat foggy technology.

Over the next few weeks, we'll be going over the basics of deploying a site and an application, adding add-ons and the many possibilities of our platform, to make you understand how much fun it is to develop.

To learn more, feel free to follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter and start a conversation about the questions you have. We'll try to answer them as best we can, as always.

One more Data Center on the way!

Good news everyone, a new Clever Cloud zone is opening in the USA! BSO Network is now a Clever Cloud on-premises customer. And has such allows us to become one of their resellers and bring you this new New-york based zone which will be available mid-march 2020.

If you are not familiar with Clever Cloud, we made a Platform as a Service available on public or private cloud and on-premises. You write code and we run it, no YAML involved, just a git push away from production. From there you get native support for most languages, Let's Encrypt integration, automatic scaling, monitoring, log collection, blue/green deployment, basically everything you need for production. And did I mention we are the one on call, not you :)

As it works on premises it can be installed anywhere. And this time it’s installed on BSO Network datacenter in new york.

Which Infrastructure does it use?

This infrastructure is within the Equinix NY4 Data Center, built with 2013 PCI-DSS and ISO 27001 certified. There are more than 500 customers doing business within this 103,630 square meters facility, which houses infrastructure for major financial exchanges.

The infrastructure is accessible through X POPS in North America, 10 DC in New Jersey and NYC area. The cloud Platform provides high availability with high-performance SLAs and is build for scale. BSO and Clever cloud also plan a West Region extension in order to add compute and geographic resiliency.

Cloud Act vs. GDPR

Our worldwide, global industry is more and more regulated and several countries came up with new laws. In our case, we need to talk about the American Cloud Act and the European GDPR. Clever Cloud being a European company, we are de facto GDPR compliant. And as the GDPR is a contaminative law we need to apply GDPR to all our customers, even non-European ones, which means we are de facto, not Cloud Act compliant

But fear not, Clever Cloud is first and foremost a Software Vendor and as such can be resold by a Cloud act compliant company like our partner BSO Network.

The way we've engineered this partnership will allow you to use Clever Cloud in the US without issues. Here's why. A communication or cloud provider may fall under the cloud act if:

• HQ of the company is in the US
• One of the branches is in the US
• A service offer is in the US for as long as the organization exists

As none of the above is true for our company, Clever Cloud won't fall under the Cloud Act law. BSO Network is operating the data center and rely on our software to manage the NYC zone with our on-premises platform. This way allows the US zone to have the full set of Clever Cloud functionalities, with multi-zones deployment made possible.

Customers using the NYC zone will be customers of BSO Network (buying them infrastructure and access cost to Clever Cloud Platform, the software) resell by Clever Cloud (here it’s more acting as a marketplace), and we will make Terms and Conditions changes in the next days to reflect that. From a practical standpoint, it will be transparent for our users. This also means that everything hosted on the NYC zone is compliant to the cloud act and not to the GDPR nor protected by the GDPR.

Can I use it?

If you are interested in the NY zone, please fill out the form below to get in touch! We will come back to you with the exact date and pricing for all our services.

To get your invite to the NYC zone, please fill this form:

Companies we are talking about

BSO is the award-winning Ethernet network, cloud and hosting provider of choice building superior infrastructure and connectivity to the world’s most dynamic marketplaces. With the recent acquisition of IX Reach, BSO increase his footprint and SDN Cloud to Cloud capabilities, becoming The world’s largest privately-owned telecom company by PoP count. Coupled with our Extensive expertise in Devops NetOPs, we provide our client on end to end service with SDN direct interconnection to all major cloud providers, remote peering at key Internet Exchanges, high-speed point-to-point/multipoint ethernet private line, metro DWDM, IP BGP transit and colocation.

Clever Cloud is a Europe-based PaaS company. They help developers deploy and run their apps with bulletproof infrastructure, automatic scaling, fair pricing, and other cool features. They aim to make an easy-to-use service, without any vendor lock-in and able to grow with your needs.

I am an existing Nodejitsu customer, how to proceed?

• the NodeJs articles in our documentation
• email support: support@clever-cloud.com

• Zero Downtime Deployments
• Build cache for instant re-deployments
• HTTP/HTTPS Routing
• Custom Domain Names
• Application SSL
• Sticky Sessions
• Application Clustering
• Environment variables
• European and American regions

Hello from Team Clever Cloud!

We are quite excited to release a major new version of our Dashboard.
It includes a lot of bug fixes as well as a few additions. We've included automatics payments, a design refresh, an activity feed, a better log management. And a nice GitHub integration too.

So today we’re launching these new features, and I'd like to detail some of them:

GitHub

As you may have noticed, the GitHub button showed up recently on the Clever Cloud website and our login & signup forms.
This feature aims to simplify the login & signup process, but also to bring your GitHub repositories to Clever Cloud.

Automatic Payments

We used to base our billing on an account balance. While running, apps consume those credits. Since the begining, our users had to fill it with money manually. Now, a monthly amount can be automatically credited each month.

And to deal with scalable consumption, a threshold can be set up too. How does it work?

The billing threshold is initially set at a certain amount. Each time your account hits its threshold before the 30-day billing cycle has ended, your credit card is debited of the amount you've set up. See an example of recurring payment configuration below:

New UI

We teamed up with our most active users to create a better and clearer UI. We’re bringing to the dashboard simpler components and a more contrasted layout. You can even add an avatar for your profile or organization.

Activity Feed

The activity feed lets you track your apps' activity. When you open the activity tab, you will see each deploy and un-deploy event, with the following data:

• the date
• the type (deploy, undeploy)
• the reason of deploy (scaling, monitoring etc)
• and the commit ID

Better Logs Management

It's now easier to deal with logs: the start time of each instance is now displayed next to its id. This allows an easier bug tracking on deploy processes. It comes with a nicer and more helpful UI.

If you want to give this a whirl, head up to the console!

It's Black Friday. And for this special day, we're glad to offer to all of our users this huge 50% discount available during 48h from now, for your next purchase on Clever Cloud: BLACKFRIDAY2014

This is our very first special discount for the Black Friday. As we're getting more and more North American users, we're launching this new habit for every year :)

Happy Coding!

TL;DR:
We are disabling the support of SSLv3 in front of our platform the Friday, 24th October. CBC has already been disabled, mitigating the issue.
The secure web is not for Internet Explorer 6 anymore.

Say hello to the POODLE

POODLE is the codename of a new vulnerability disclosed by Google earlier this week. This vulnerability is not related to a specific software but to a whole protocol: SSLv3.

In few words this vulnerability gives the ability to an attacker to force a client downgrading the protocol version and the cipher suite used to talk to a secure server even if it is compatible with the most recent and secure one. After that the attacker will be able to perform a Padding Oracles attack to decipher the communication.

Does Clever Cloud POODLE?

The most efficient way to prevent this attack on the server-side is to remove the support of the SSL version 3. Removing this version will block some users like Internet Explorer 6 -which is not compatible with the newest protocol TLS- and very old devices.

Even if it is a good pretext to end the very long life of Internet Explorer 6, we prefer to check the impact on our customers before applying this update.

We are planning to disable the support of SSLv3 in front of our platform the Friday, 24th October. If you are a SSL customer and want to keep it, let us know by sending an email to our support.

Disabling SSLv3 is not the only way to mitigate this issue. After the downgrade dance, the most vulnerable cipher suite is CBC and… good news, this cipher was disabled widely on our platform earlier this year!

We are also deploying a patch to support a new cipher suite flag which tells to a server to reject any inappropriate fallback from a client.

Did you like [Heartbleed?]({{ site.basepath }}/features/2014/04/08/openssl-101g-update.html) Meet Shellshock — aka CVE-2014-6271 — a new bug discovered this week in the widely used Bash command line interpreter.

First things first

Are you safe at Clever Cloud?

Yes. Yesterday afternoon (September, the 24th), a patch was released by the bash developpers to address this issue.

A member of our team, Kevin Decherf, then submitted an updated bash package with this patch to the distribution we use: exherbo.

The patch was reviewed by several members of the core exherbo team and finally validated by me, both as member of Clever Cloud and of the exherbo core team at around 5PM (CEST).

The update was then propagated inside our Cloud platform and all the critical virtual machines got bash updated today.

What about you, <localhost>?

You really should care about this new vulnerability.

It can compromise especially Apache web servers using CGI scripts with Bash invocation, making your system vulnerable to remote-code injection. OpenSSH and some DHCP clients are affected as well on machines that use Bash.

We are finally landing in America! As most of our customers are outside of Europe, our hosting service has made its way to a new continent. Same service, same price, same dashboard and now a regional choice on top.

Our team has been working on this development for a long time. We wanted to improve the user experience for American users, and we are very excited that everything is working out today, just as we wanted.

Why Canada?

We have selected a great partner, Netelligent, to ensure high quality and high availability of your applications. Users throughout Canada, US and Latin America will benefit from an enhanced connectivity and enjoy a better experience of PaaS with Clever Cloud.

Here at Clever Cloud, we care about your data privacy. Our European data-centers suit our security standards and that’s why we chose to partner up with Netelligent in Quebec, Canada.

Simple and Easy Migration

Migrating existing apps to a new location is quite simple. To switch from a location to another, you simply have to change the Zone field in the Information tab of your apps:

Once you're done, if you're using a .cleveraps.io domain name, everything is automatic, otherwise you will have to update your DNS settings to go directly to Montreal without going through Paris.

Note that this quick migration isn't currently supported for php applications, or for applications using File-System buckets.

Deploying on both continents

For reasons of clarity, we ask you to choose one zone per app. So you need to create two Clever Cloud applications.

Running the same code base on both regions is pretty straightforward:

• Create a second app in the new region via the dashboard
• Get the new git push URL and add it to your git config via the following command line:

# Assuming you added a "clever" remote as described in the documentation like this:
# git remote add clever git+ssh://git@push.par.clever-cloud.com/appid1.git

# Set your first specific push URL for Paris on the "clever" remote
$ git remote set-url --push clever git+ssh://git@push.par.clever-cloud.com/appid1.git

# Set your second specific  push URL for montreal on the "clever" remote
$ git remote set-url --add --push clever git+ssh://git@push.mtl.clever-cloud.com/appid2.git

Then your project config file located in .git/config should contain something like this:

[remote "clever"]
  url = git+ssh://git@push.par.clever-cloud.com/appid1.git
  pushUrl = git+ssh://git@push.par.clever-cloud.com/appid1.git
  pushUrl = git+ssh://git@push.mtl.clever-cloud.com/appid2.git

Note that, due to git internal behaviour, you explicitely need to re-add the first remote url (the Paris one) as a pushUrl too, otherwise it would only push to Montreal.

Now, one push will deploy your code both in Paris and Montreal.

Security and Patriot Act

We care about our customers privacy. We have selected this location because it is Patriot Act-free, and Canada has IP laws to protect your data. Privacy is a strong part of our core values at Clever Cloud.

• Deploying Play Framework 2 apps on Clever Cloud
• Using Java Maven on Clever Cloud
• Deploying WAR/EAR projects

• Zero Downtime Deployments
• HTTP/HTTPS Routing
• Custom Domain Names
• Application SSL
• Sticky Sessions
• Application Clustering
• Environment variables

Yesterday, a security patch of OpenSSL 1.0.1g was issued, fixing a pretty critical vulnerability (refered to as CVE-2014-0160).

Once issued, the Clever Cloud support team immediately updated our service with it.

Who's affected?

If you have SSL enabled on Clever Cloud, you have to read the following.

What to do?

Clever Cloud is not vulnerable to this security breach anymore, but we urge you to regenerate SSL keys and re-issue your certificate. Certificate regeneration is not a sufficient solution to protect you completely, you also have to regenerate a new SSL key. If you have any questions related to this security update for your apps hosted on Clever Cloud, feel free to send us an e-mail, our team will keep you informed of future developments.

Which versions of OpenSSL are vulnerable?

• OpenSSL 1.0.1 through 1.0.1f (inclusive) are vulnerable
• OpenSSL 1.0.1g is NOT vulnerable
• OpenSSL 1.0.0 branch is NOT vulnerable
• OpenSSL 0.9.8 branch is NOT vulnerable