2-Factor Authentication for Cloud-A

With the growth and adoption of Cloud-A’s infrastructure services around the world, having thousands of active projects, and twice that number of active users — our responsibility to provide a secure entry point into the services that store your application’s private data, that help run your businesses day-to-day, is greater than ever. With online threats growing, more advanced phishing techniques, and identity theft, ensuring secure access to any service becomes difficult. It doesn’t matter how long or complex your password is, your account is at risk of being breached if it were to somehow fall into the wrong hands.

1faTo this end, we are very pleased to announce the general availability of two-factor authentication for Cloud-A accounts. Our development team had been working on building an OTP solution into Keystone, our authentication service, and released it into beta late last year. After months of end-user testing, and security auditing by third parties, we are enabling the feature for all users.

Two-factor authentication, or 2FA, by its definition allows you to secure your account via a second “factor” rather than just a password. Because passwords can be read or stolen, and are a single piece of information that any malicious person needs to access your account, a second factor called One Time Passwords or OTP are used and linked to a physical device that is on your person — so you know that the person logging in is truly you. This added security will thwart would-be attackers even if they know your account password.

Available Today

otp-configuration

2FA for Cloud-A allows you enable 2FA from within your Cloud-A Account Settings in the client portal. This will generate your private key and show you your QR code and recovery codes, as well as provide you with a quick OTP test mechanism to confirm your settings. Once enabled, you can use our 2FA with any Google Authenticator compatible mobile application. We highly recommend FreeOTP for managing your OTP credentials. It is free, secure, standards-compliant, and open source. The app is available for download on Google Play for Android, as well as the App Store for iOS devices.

As previously noted, Cloud-A’s 2FA architecture is built into Keystone, meaning that two-factor authentication is available at both the web dashboard level and also at the API layer. The result is a completely new architecture, and new way to approach OpenStack authentication. We hope that this not only shows our commitment to on-going product development for our customers, but our commitment to the OpenStack project as a whole.

Users will not be forced to enable OTP on their accounts, however we highly recommend setting it up. You can read more information on the configuration process in our documentation portal. Taking a few minutes to enable this feature on your account could mean the difference between an adversary accessing your account and gaining access to your cloud infrastructure, and stopping them right at the door.

If you have any questions or concerns about configuring 2FA on your account, we’d love to hear from you! You can reach our support team quickly and easily by emailing support@clouda.ca.

WordPress Backups for Beginners and Advanced Users

Backup MemeWe all know that backing up data is important. Whether it’s a corporate Windows file server, or our treasured family photos, we make sure that we can recover our data in the case of a hardware failure. Oddly enough, most folks tend to skip over their website data when considering their backup strategy.

Although WordPress is the most used CMS in the world, many users still struggle to find a good backup solution. Thankfully, using a combination of Cloud-A’s Bulk Storage and the popular Updraft Plus WordPress Backups plugin, automatically backing up and restoring your website is extremely easy and cost effective. This makes it an ideal solution for WordPress users of any skill level.

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Volumes 101

various-hard-drives

We are often asked about whether or not you can attach additional storage onto instances. Occasionally the base disk size just won’t do, or you have special storage requirements. The answer is Volumes. You can think of Volumes like portable hard drives you can add to your server. The data remains on the volume even as you connect it to various servers (one at a time). A common use case is to attach a Volume for consolidated backups for multiple servers.

Volumes are ideal for adding additional storage for existing servers without having to pay for additional compute resources. So you can spin up a small VM and use volumes to supplement your storage requirements.

For example, provisioning a 512MB VM with 10GB of disk and using volumes to make up the next (20GB) tier’s disk of 30GB would only cost an additional $5 (20GB * $0.25). You aren’t charged for incoming traffic or the amount of I/O you do. You are simply charged for the amount of storage you have. This is measured by GBs of provisioned storage and charged at $0.25 / GB / month, or ~$0.0003 / GB / hr. This can enable huge cost savings by only provisioning exactly what you need.

Prerequisites

Have a Cloud-A account (don’t have one yet?), and at least one instance spun up. You can follow the start of this post for how to get started spinning up a Windows instance on our platform.

Creating a Volume

To create a volume, visit the Volumes page on your dashboard, and click on the “Create Volume” button.

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In the modal window, enter a Volume Name, optional Description, select the Type (Regular) and your desired Size in GB. We’ll just make a small 2GB Volume for this demo. After hitting “Create Volume”, you’ll see a “Creating Volume” message while it is being provisioned.

Once you have your Volume created you need to Attach it to the desired Instance. Click Edit Attachments to open the Manage Volume Attachments window. Under Attachments you will see any Instances the volume is currently attached to. (It should be blank now).

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Open the Attach to Instance dropdown and select the instance you wish to connect the volume to, then “Attach Volume”.

Just like that, your Volume is attached to your instance, and available to be formatted & mounted in the OS.

Formatting & Mounting Your Volume

Before you can make use of your volume in your operating system of choice, you’ll need to format the disk and mount it so you can start using it for storage. Below you’ll find some basic instructions for Linux and Windows instances that will get your disk mounted and ready.

Linux Servers

For linux servers (ubuntu 12.04 is used in the example below), it’s a quick process using fdisk, mkfs and mount.

$ ssh ubuntu@<my-instance-ip>
$ sudo -i
$ fdisk /dev/vdb
  # create new partition (n), 
  # primary (1), 
  # answer yes to start and end blocks to use entire disk.
$ mkfs.ext4 /dev/vdb1
$ mkdir /mount
$ mount /dev/vdb1 /mount

If you would like the Volume to be mounted on boot (permanently attached). You can add an entry in your /etc/fstab that looks something like the following.

/dev/vdb1    /mount   ext4    defaults     0        2

Windows Servers

For Windows servers (Windows Server 2008 R2 is used in the example), You can do it all from the console. If you’re still on the Volumes screen, you can click the link to the server, and then click the “Console” tab to get to it quickly.

Once logged in and set up, click on Server Manager – on bottom left next to the Start button. Then click on Storage and then Disk Management.

Screenshot_2014-05-15_16_42_38

Right click the Volume you added (labelled Disk 1), and select New Simple Volume. That will launch a Wizard to format the new disk. Following the prompts and using the default values will be fine. Once it finishes formatting (this may take a few moments), you’re done!

Screenshot_2014-05-15_16_45_35

If you flip back to your dashboard, you should see that the Status is “In-Use”. Success!

Volume FAQ

  1. What is the max number of volumes that can be connected to any one server? As many as you like, it is bottlenecked by the OS that you’re connecting it to.
  2. What are the smallest / largest size volumes? We have customers with volumes sizes from 1GB through to 10TB.
  3. How are volumes metered? Usage is added up at the end of the month, and calculated based on $0.25/gb/month. Point in time snapshots are taken of usage, and added up for each second of use. i.e. day 1 you’re using 1GB, for the time of that day, you’re charged that much, day 30 you’re using 1TB, only the last day are you charged the 1TB amount for usage.
  4. Are Volumes slow storage? No, Volumes are very fast! – SSD Backed storage, the same stuff that gives you blazing fast IO on your VMs.

Ready to give it a try?

Get started with a $10 credit

Create my account!

Creating Network Infrastructure in Dash

Dash is an extremely powerful web-based UI that helps users efficiently manage their cloud infrastructure. While we aim to make the initial setup process as quick and simple as possible, we also want to give administrators the flexibility to create networks and systems that fit exactly to their needs. Due to the variety of options and settings that users are presented with when setting their infrastructure up for the first time, we provide an Introduction Wizard to guide them through the process of creating a network, volumes, and instances. However, some of the choices for getting a core network setup and ready to place instances on can be confusing for beginners.

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