When it comes to Object Storage we know that consumers are looking to address three main factors.

• 100% Canadian Location
• Data Redundancy
• Priced as low as $0.03/GB (with no egress fees)

As a reminder, the following features and benefits are included with all Bulk Storage accounts:

• Unlimited number of containers and objects
• Any file type can be uploaded
• Supports unlimited amount of storage, billed by usage with large discounts by volume
• Container Specific API Keys
• DDoS Mitigation & CDN Support (blkstr.ca) with intelligent routing 
• Availability rate of 99.99+%
• High file durability
• OpenStack-compatible API
• Expert Support team to share knowledge for any integration

Object Storage
Our “Bulk Storage” product, comparable to “S3” but leveraging “Openstack Swift”, is a distributed storage system for static data, such as virtual machine images, image storage, email storage, web assets, backups, and archives. Object Storage is different than traditional storage in that it’s not centralized and provides greater scalability, redundancy, and durability as a result.

What is the typical Use Case for Object Storage?
Object Storage was designed for Ad Hoc use. It’s ideal for scalable storage needs, a common example would be for storing images that are rendered within an application framework. Because the platform is API-driven it’s very easily integrated into your application for data management. Your data is never affected by a server or drive failure because the Bulk Storage platform (that leverages OpenStack Swift) replicates its content from other active nodes to new locations in the clusters no less than 3 times.

Our approach has and will always be to be 100% Canadian. That means all of our infrastructure (for all 3 nodes in Vancouver, Toronto, & Halifax) all our staff, and our entire ownership group is without exception entirely Canadian.

The cloud is great for hosting internet-facing applications, but what if you require something that can only be accessed by a set list of users? Sure, you can maintain security groups with those users’ IP addresses, or use login pages to block access to unauthorized users. An alternative and more secure solution is the use of a Virtual Private Network (VPN) between a user’s local network and your Cloud-A private network. There are several VPN solutions available, both free and commercial. We’re going to show you how to use one of the most popular free VPNs available, OpenVPN.

Read more

This is a quick guide to installing OpenShift Origin on a Cloud-A CentOS 7 instance. For the purposes of this tutorial, we are going to be using a single instance to perform an all-in-one installation. More advanced, clustered setup instructions can be found in the OpenShift Origin documentation.

What is OpenShift?

OpenShift is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) developed by Redhat. PaaS augments your existing Cloud-A Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) by providing automated tools that assist developers in running an environment to host their applications on. In OpenShift’s case, this is provided by leveraging Docker and Kubernetes, giving you the ability to have custom, reusable application images. OpenShift also allows you to have highly available, self-healing, and auto-scaling applications without any of the manual setup that would typically need to be done in a traditional environment. 

Prerequisites

This guide assumes that you have setup a CentOS 7 instance on Cloud-A and have associated a public IP address with it. In our tutorial, we are using a 4GB General Purpose instance.

Once you have your instance up and running, Docker will need to be installed along with a few requirements. Feel free to replace vim with your favourite text editor.

$ sudo yum install docker wget vim

We will then need to tell Docker to trust the registry that we are going to be using for OpenShift images. In the /etc/sysconfig/docker file we will need to change the following line:

# INSECURE_REGISTRY='--insecure-registry'

to

INSECURE_REGISTRY='--insecure-registry 172.30.0.0/16'

Once complete, save your changes and restart the docker service:

$ sudo systemctl restart docker

OpenShift will also require that our instance’s hostname can be resolved. Adding an entry to /etc/hosts will take care of this for us. If you don’t know your instance’s hostname, you can simply run the hostname command.

Old /etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1   localhost localhost.localdomain localhost4 localhost4.localdomain4
::1         localhost localhost.localdomain localhost6 localhost6.localdomain6

New /etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1   <HOSTNAME> localhost localhost.localdomain localhost4 localhost4.localdomain4
::1         localhost localhost.localdomain localhost6 localhost6.localdomain6

Read more

Looking for a Canadian-based Dropbox alternative that’s also easy to setup and manage? Look no further. Using the power of Docker as well as Cloud Brewery’s open-source docrane project, we’re going to create a self-healing ownCloud installation, that’s also easy to patch and upgrade. In this tutorial, we’re going to be using CentOS 7 as our Docker host, however you can adapt these instructions for any other Linux distro.

To get started, let’s grab and install Docker:

curl https://get.docker.com | bash
usermod -a -G docker centos

That may take a few minutes to complete. This might be a good time to grab a coffee.

Next up, we’re going to install docrane (and it’s dependencies):

easy_install pip 
yum install -y git libffi-devel gcc python-devel
git clone https://github.com/CloudBrewery/docrane.git
cd docrane && pip install -r requirements.txt && python setup.py install

Read more

A couple of weekends ago Cloud-A headed to Waterloo, Canada’s tech mecca, to sponsor and judge the city’s first ever open data hackathon: the Waterloo Codefest. Waterloo is a city where we have several users and hanging out in Waterloo for the weekend gave us the opportunity to meet with some of these existing users, gain feedback and better understand exactly what our users are looking for in a cloud provider.

The Hackathon

Waterloo Codefest was a 36 hour hackathon that was held at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, a beautiful venue that provided the amenities and comfort to dozens of programmers, designers and business minded participants.

I had the opportunity to judge the event and spent the weekend with the participants, watching them take their ideas and turn them into fully functional applications that make use of Waterloo’s open data sets.

Nearly 20 applications were presented, where participants had 5 minutes to present and demo their concept to satisfy the criteria that was set out for the event:

• Technicality
• Originality
• How unique and innovative is the demo?
• Practicality
• How useful is this demo based on the problem they are trying to solve? Issues/problems that were identified by the public on Open City Hall.
• Aesthetics
• How good is the visual design and interaction experience?
• Wow Factor
• Are you blown away by what you see?

In the end, Timber, an application that plotted the location free within Waterloo on a map and allowing users to become more connected with nature, report damaged trees to the municipality and schedule “Treetups” – public meetups at a tree of your choice, was the winner. The group  included uWaterloo Computer Science student George Utsin and high school students John Fish and Alex Foley.

Read more