Surprise as it often happens: the report that was made on your company two months ago is going to be programmed tomorrow evening. Or, in the middle of a hot topic, your product is going to be the subject of an item during the 8 o'clock news.

The TV appearance is always a bad match for the web: because when you size your IT infrastructure, it's more to manage your growth over 3 years. On a nice upward curve, usually linear. And when the traffic peaks by 800%, your architecture will be on its knees.

Except with Clever Cloud. Configuring your applications to absorb a traffic spike can be done with a few clicks in the interface:

Only, managing site traffic is easy when you are already hosted by Clever Cloud. But if this is not the case, there is no fatality.

Yesterday, M6 broadcast the show "Who wants to be my partner? And the young company BioDemain, which helps agricultural producers during the three years of their organic transition, took part. Hosted on a traditional architecture, the risk of the service falling down is great. So we helped BioDemain migrate their site to Clever Cloud in less than 24 hours!

How Clever Cloud handles these traffic spikes

First of all, managing site traffic will be done on the Clever Cloud side by load-balancers before reaching your application. These load-balancers (formerly HAProxy instances, and now instances of Sōzu, an in-house software) are going to distribute the traffic among themselves. Just like if you had Amazon ELBs (Elastic Load Balancer), except that here it's included by default, and already configured.

Your application will then receive the traffic. Depending on your scaling configuration, your application will be able to trigger alerts to our monitoring system if CPU and RAM increase. And therefore multiply the number of instances. Load-balancers and multiple instances in a few seconds: and you are ready to handle the traffic.

The migration itself

To move to Clever Cloud so quickly, we were put in touch with the BioDemain team. And it was the formidable support organisation that was at their side to migrate their site (here a Wordpress) from a shared solution to Clever Cloud. Despite a rather… tight schedule.

The recipe for success was a very quick migration. Indeed, there are two ways to deploy your Wordpress on Clever Cloud:

• Quickly, with a simple FTP transfer.
• More elegantly, using git for the code, Cellar for the media and Composer for the plug-ins.

Obviously we went for the first solution.
After contacting the developer of BioDemain, the first step was to transfer the files between the old host and Clever.
Several tens of thousands of files, so in FTP it takes time.

While waiting for the end of the file transfer, our team and BioDemain were able to deploy two other instances: MySQL and Redis. Then came the configuration of the PHP application itself (still during the transfer).
Here we had to:

• Activate ProxySQL to mutualize the application connections
• Configure proxySQL via simple environment variables:
  • CC_ENABLE_MYSQL_PROXYSQL=true for activation
  • CC_MYSQL_PROXYSQL_MAX_CONNECTIONS =15 to set the maximum number of connections to be managed
  • CC_MYSQL_PROXYSQL_USE_TLS=true if needed
• Make a dump of the original MySQL database and import this dump into the new one
• Enable the Redis session in PHP via environment variable].

Extra tech tips

• You can also enable the Varnish built into Clever Cloud if you feel like it:
• Put in a CDN: if you don't have time to optimize your SQL queries, caching strategies, minifications etc., CDNs are there to offload some of the traffic to them.
• Before anything else, lower the TTL of your CNAME and A records of your domain name. At the time of migration, if you are short of time and the changes to the domain name are propagated over 24 hours, you will find it a shame.
• And if you ever have a down, redirect your home page to an application that displays a contact form: users can then leave an email to be contacted again.

Finally, evaluate the performance. The fateful moment of the TV pass does not suffer from a single oversight. To do this: JMeter locally (beware, it requires resources), or great online services like gatling.io

You have all the cards in hand for the next step :) Good luck!

Paris, January 3, 2022 - Clever Cloud, a provider of automated solutions for the deployment and maintenance of online applications, has announced the arrival of Steven Le Roux as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and the appointment of Cédric Biron as Chief Operating Officer (COO). The company is thus continuing to structure its management to support its strong growth.

Expert in telecom networks and hosting infrastructures, Steven Le Roux began his career at France Telecom (Orange) and then at the Crédit Mutuel ARKEA group, where he was a network engineer until 2013. It was then that he joined the hosting company OVHCloud to develop the denial of service attack detection system before specialising in Big Data databases, then the development of monitoring solutions and managed services. In 2018, he was appointed by OVHCloud as Principal Engineer in the department in charge of the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) strategy.

Steven joined Clever Cloud on 3 January 2022 as Chief Technical Officer (CTO) and will now use all his skills and experience to lead Clever Cloud's technical teams, which are spread across France and are set to expand. He will be responsible for the management and advanced design of Clever Cloud's physical infrastructure, as well as leading the development of the software that underpins the automation solutions that are at the heart of the hosting company's offering. He will report to Quentin Adam, co-founder and CEO of Clever Cloud.

"I am very happy and proud to welcome Steven to Clever Cloud. He is both an excellent engineer, very knowledgeable about our market and technological environment, and an experienced manager who will help us structure our developments in an important phase of the company's growth", says Quentin Adam.

“It is a great pleasure to join Clever Cloud, whose great qualities and customer appeal I have seen from the outside, with unrivalled PaaS expertise in Europe. Clever Cloud already offers very robust and competitive automated solutions, and I want to help the company expand its catalogue and scale up more quickly," comments Steven Le Roux.

Clever Cloud also announces the appointment of Cédric Biron as Chief Operating Officer (COO). A graduate of the Mines ParisTech engineering school, Cédric joined the BNP Paribas group in 2008 at the Inspection Générale, and was soon appointed consultant within the investment bank (CIB), which led him to work in New York and San Francisco on international regulatory issues, strategic plans and change management. In 2015, he joined the "CIB Data & AI lab" at its inception as a Lead Data Scientist, where he worked specifically on data science, analytics, visualization and strategy projects until 2019 when he chose to become an external consultant and join Credit Leader as a Partner and CTO. Cedric had joined Clever Cloud in March 2021 as a project manager, and will now be in charge of the operational management of Clever Cloud as COO.

“On his arrival, where he methodically took charge of a multitude of internal projects and partnerships, Cédric very quickly demonstrated all the qualities and rigour he had acquired through solid experience with the leading European bank. It was only natural to appoint him Director of Operations, a position in which he will help us structure the company's organisation," says Quentin Adam.

“I am very honoured by this appointment, Clever Cloud is a company in which I quickly felt at ease, with a very strong culture of operational efficiency and the desire to learn and progress, but also a spirit of family and mutual support which make it a unique company. It is this culture that I will be keen to preserve, and I would like to thank Quentin for the trust he has placed in me", comments Cédric Biron.

About de Clever Cloud

Founded in 2010, Clever Cloud is a company based in Nantes specialising in IT automation. It creates and provides the software building blocks necessary for the flexible deployment of applications on self-service PaaS architectures. Its clients include such big names as Airbus, AXA, Caisse d'Épargne, Cegid, Docaposte, MAIF, McDonald's, Solocal, SNCF, TBWA…

Paris, 25 October 2021

Clever Cloud, a European provider of automation and optimization solutions for hosting websites and applications on the Internet, announces the appointment of Guillaume Champeau as Chief Legal and Public Affairs Officer. Guillaume's arrival marks the beginning of a new phase in the company's structuring, enabling Clever Cloud to continue and accelerate its sustained growth in the cloud market. He will report directly to the CEO of Clever Cloud, Quentin Adam.

Clever Cloud is a French company Creator of its own software technologies since 2010 and a pioneer in Europe of app deployment automation, Clever Cloud is a French company which has numerous of customers in 80 countries around the world. With a turnover that has almost doubled again in one year, Clever Cloud has experienced significant growth since its creation, due in particular to its ability to regularly bring innovations to its customers. For example, in October 2021 alone, Clever Cloud was the first cloud provider in Europe to launch Apache Pulsar as a managed service, followed by Jenkins with per-second pricing for tasks, and the Clever Cloud TARDIS time series database, billed by usage.

Guillaume Champeau, 39, began his career by creating PressTIC, the publisher of the Numerama website, which he founded and which has become one of the most widely read websites in France on digital news. Trained as a lawyer specialising in digital law and the protection of fundamental rights on the Internet, Guillaume then joined Qwant to become the director of ethics and public relations for the search engine, before creating the legal department. In this capacity, he contributed to leading important battles against abusive practices of dominant position and for the promotion of European solutions. He joins Clever Cloud to take charge of the company's public affairs policy and to assume the legal direction of the company.

"We are very pleased to welcome Guillaume to our team. Guillaume brings to Clever Cloud his experience and expertise in the field of digital law, his leadership and his understanding of the strategic issues of the market, which he will be able to raise with public and private decision makers. I look forward to working with him", says Quentin Adam, co-founder and CEO of Clever Cloud.

"It is a great pride for me to join Clever Cloud, whose great qualities and determination to bring to France and Europe its solutions for a sovereign control of the cloud I have known for a long time. Clever Cloud is a technology company that is highly respected and appreciated by developers, ambitious, with a vision and dynamism that are pleasing. It corresponds in every way to the values that I have always defended and that I will continue to defend in my new role", says Guillaume Champeau.

About Clever Cloud

Founded in 2010, Clever Cloud is a company based in Nantes specialising in IT automation. It creates and provides the software building blocks necessary for the flexible deployment of applications on self-service SaaS architectures. Its clients include such big names as Airbus, AXA, Caisse d'Épargne, Cegid, Docaposte, MAIF, McDonald's, Solocal, SNCF, TBWA, ....

At Clever Cloud we aim to provide the best services for all kinds of data. Time Series data are no exception to this. We're thrilled to announce a time series database, TARDIS, in the next few weeks.

About TARDIS Features

A Time Series Database (TSDB) store series of chronological data, in an optimised way. The use cases are numerous:

1. Time Series and Signal processing : TARDIS will be able to store your metrics and states. It will also offer an interactive and analytical queryable store to monitor changes over time.
2. BI & Analytics : You can use TARDIS as an analytical solution for Time Series. It will power Time Series analytical queries as well as dashboards. We are planning 3rd party integration too.
3. Monitoring: TARDIS will help you to integrate KPIs from a specialised service.

Technology & Supported Protocols

This TSDB will be backed by our partner SenX, the company behind Warp10, on a distributed infrastructure backed by OVHcloud.

One of the most interesting news about TARDIS is its ability to be a polyglot TSDB and to support multiple query languages and protocols. For instance, you can push your data with Prometheus, and you can retrieve it with WarpScript or PromQL. It’s the same data, without duplication.

The architecture uses proxies (hosted and managed by Clever Cloud) that bridges the gap between Warp10 and various requests protocols, similar to our metrics backend.

Reliability FTW

TARDIS stores data in a strongly consistent fashion, thanks to a transactional pipeline. So, we won’t lose any data once a push is acknowledged.

Regarding high availability, we operate a special care for the storage too. Namely, rack awareness optimisations, network topology fault isolation and data placements.

We’ve designed everything in TARDIS for very high scalability. We clocked this technology with production workloads with millions data points per second, and over a billion unique series for a single region.

Pay as You Go

TARDIS only bills for what users use. It start at 5 millions points (perfect for an app that produce 100 data points every minute, during a month). We will release the final pricing within the next few days. We will propose a beta program at a relatively low price first. Then the stabilised product pricing will change a bit, still at a competitive level (as always!).

Integrated Authentication

TARDIS will be integrated with Clever Cloud IAM, as it is with our Apache Pulsar and Elasticsearch services. In the meantime, we provide crypto tokens that let users define read or write access, to their entire data set or subscope to specific labels.

Deletion & GDPR

TARDIS complies with GDPR by allowing customers to delete their data. Deletes can occur on a single data point, a whole series, or a set of series, over a specified time range. Which is particularly useful nowadays. To learn more about this, check the documentation. 

Release date and beta program

We're planning  the public release by the end of the 2021. But we can provide the service in advance as of today. You can reach us via the following form :

Platform Updates #65 - 2021-07-22

[Unreleased]

• Private network groups.
• New ACL management.
• Vector.dev support

Platform changes

All instances

• Workers: New env variable CC_WORKER_RESTART_DELAY - More info in the documentation
• linux 5.11.21

Haskell

• New env variable CC_HASKELL_STACK_TARGET - Documentation draft here

Ruby

• New env variables - More info in the documentation
  • CC_RAKEGOALS
  • CC_ENABLE_SIDEKIQ
  • CC_SIDEKIQ_FILES

PHP

• Elastic APM Agent availability
• New env variable CC_CGI_IMPLEMENTATION More info in the documentation

Python

• New variable CC_PYTHON_MANAGE_TASKS More info in the documentation

Add-ons

• PostgreSQL: PGPool availability
• PostgreSQL updated :
  • postgresql 13.3
  • postgresql 12.7
  • postgresql 11.12
  • timescaledb 2.2.1
  • postgis 2.5.5
  • postgis 3.1.1

Documentation

• GitHub comments are now available on every page

The Prices

The Changes

Platform Updates #64 - 2021-06-17

[Unreleased]

• Private network groups.
• New ACL management.
• Vector.dev support

Platform changes

All instances

• linux 5.11.18
• libvips is now available on every runtime

Python

• Python 3.9.5
• Python 3.8.10
• pip 21.1.1

Java

• Wildfly 23 now supported for java/war apps

Postgresql

• 13.2
• 12.6
• 11.11
• timescaledb 2.2.0

Platform Updates #63 - 2021-04-29

[Unreleased]

• Private network groups.
• New ACL management.
• Vector.dev support

Platform changes

All instances

• linux 5.11.15
• glibc 2.33

PHP

• 8.0.3
• 7.4.16
• New variable CC_REALPATH_CACHE_TTL (https://www.php.net/manual/fr/ini.core.php#ini.realpath-cache-size)
• New variable CC_OPCACHE_PRELOAD: CC_OPCACHE_PRELOAD=path-to-preload-script.php (https://www.php.net/manual/fr/opcache.preloading.php)
• AMQP extension now supports php 8
  • php-amqp (1.11.0beta), librabbitmq (0.11.0) (See https://github.com/php-amqp/php-amqp/releases/tag/v1.11.0beta)
• COMPOSER: version bump to 2.0.12
• PHPREDIS: version bump to 5.3.4

Docker

• docker 20.10.5

Java

• java 16
• maven 3.8.1
• sbt 1.5.1
• gradle 7.0
• dropped java 9 10 12 13 14 15
• R is now available on java
• graalvm 21.1.0

Python

• 3.9.4
• 3.8.9
• support for uvicorn
• support for daphne

Go

• go 1.16.2
• Varnish support on Go applications

Ruby

• 3.0.1
• 2.7.3
• 2.6.7
• 2.5.9

Rust

• 1.51.0
• 1.52.0-beta.3
• 1.53.0-nightly

Node.JS

• 16.0.0
• 15.14.0
• 14.16.1
• 12.22.1
• 10.24.1

DOTNET CORE

• version bump to 5.0.202

MySQL

• A new ProxySQL support: ProxySQL is now available on every application linked with a MySQL add-on, for better performances (a post is coming soon)

Platform Updates #62 - 2021-02-04

[Unreleased]

• Private network groups.
• Option for data disk at-rest encryption at add-on creation.
• New ACL management.
• Vector.dev support

Platform changes

All instances

• linux 5.10.11

Docker

• 20.10.3

Java

• graalvm 21.0.0

Go

• 1.15.7

Haskell

• stack 2.5.1
• lts 17.0 preinstalled

Node.JS

• 15.7.0
• 10.23.2

Platform Updates #61 - 2021-01-26

[Unreleased]

• Private network groups.
• Option for data disk at-rest encryption at add-on creation.
• New ACL management.
• Vector.dev support

Platform changes

All instances

• linux 5.10.8

Docker

• 20.10.1

.NET Core

• 5.0.102
• 3.1.110

Elasticsearch

• 6.8.13
• 7.10.2

Erlang

• erlang 23.2.1
• elixir 1.11.3

Go

• 1.15.6

MySQL

• Percona-Server 8.0.22
• Percona-Server 5.7.32

Node.JS

• 15.6.0
• 14.15.4
• 12.20.1
• 10.23.1

PHP

• 7.3.26
• 7.4.14
• 8.0.1

PostgreSQL

• 13.1
• 12.3
• 11.10

Python

• 3.9.1
• 3.8.7
• 3.7.9

Redis

• 6.0.10

Rust

• stable 1.49.0
• beta 1.50.0-beta.6
• nightly 1.51.0-nightly