2022 has come and gone! We want to continue our tradition of looking at the milestones and highlights of the past year. This year has been full of great achievements and accomplishments, even though the global atmosphere continues to be rough.
We want to thank all our users and partners for their continuous and unbroken support. Let’s take a look at what we achieved together through 2022!
A special year at UpCloud
UpCloud was started in 2012, which means that in 2022, we had our 10-year anniversary! To celebrate this, we brought everyone together during our yearly company retreat, this time in Rome, Italy. In 2012, we went on our very first retreat, which took place in London with only four people. We have come quite a long way since then.
We organize a company-wide retreat every year for our co-workers. It’s great for innovation and cross-team collaboration, as everyone has a chance to meet their colleagues from our other offices.
The road has been exciting and memorable for all of us at UpCloud. It has been especially exciting to see our customer base grow as we’ve introduced new products and opened new data centres across the world. It was nice to bring so many of us together and celebrate our shared achievements. We can’t wait to see what the future brings!
Our new managed services
At UpCloud, we want to create valuable products and services that make our customers’ lives easier. We accomplish this in many ways, and one of them is through our managed services. In 2022, we’ve launched two new managed services and a third is in the later stages of development going into 2023. Let’s take a closer look at these services and their respective launches.
The first release of the year was Managed Load Balancer. This managed service empowers you to effortlessly build resilience and increase application throughput with a simple yet flexible configuration. It enables you to quickly plug in new backend resources and scale up the capabilities of your application. This is all done via our intuitive Control Panel without needing to access the command line or configuration files.
Managed Load Balancer followed our hugely popular Managed Databases, which was one of our biggest launches in 2021. Both of these managed services are built to take advantage of our powerful and highly resilient cloud infrastructure meaning stress-free operations on both the front and backend for our customers. Through these services, we want to show our intent to build a platform of managed services that enables our users to develop in a swift manner without needing to reinvent the wheel at every turn.
Since its launch, Managed Load Balancer has received a host of new updates and features. While the service was launched as an open beta, in September we were happy to announce that it had graduated from beta and reached full production capability!
In November, we launched Managed Databases for Redis. Redis at its core has a clear focus on performance and UpCloud also has the same priority. We see the performance we deliver as one of our biggest strengths. Therefore, launching Managed Databases for Redis made sense as we further committed ourselves towards that strength.
New expertise and partners
Our team at UpCloud has continued to grow at a breakneck pace with new exciting talent having joined all through the year. Notably, we welcomed Niloufar Viljanen and Annukka Piirala to the UpCloud leadership team as Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Financial Officer, reporting directly to our CEO Antti Vilpponen.
Niloufar and Annukka are highly experienced in their area of expertise and have a proven track record of building organisations and growing the business. I am extremely thrilled to welcome both to our talented and motivated team. Over the past few years, we have progressed as a European cloud service provider with a global reach. With the leadership team in full strength, we will further advance our position in the market and help our customers to propel their business.
Antti Vilpponen, CEO of UpCloud
In 2022, we also forged many successful partnerships. Quite recently, at the end of the year, we announced that we joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a community of true Kubernetes experts. Our Managed Kubernetes service is currently under development and we want to build it in alignment with the cloud-native community. It will be launched next year and we’ve therefore opened the early bird registration. Make sure to register your interest if you would like to get an invitation to the next testing phase. You could be among the very first to try out the new managed service.
CNCF is the open-source vendor-neutral hub of cloud-native computing. It’s a non-profit organisation founded in 2015 and is a part of The Linux Foundation with a mission to advance the use of cloud-native technologies, like containers. As such it’s hosting the Kubernetes project to make cloud-native computing universal and sustainable which makes UpCloud joining CNCF a natural progression towards our goals.
Towards 2023 and beyond
The past year has undoubtedly been challenging for most with inflation driving up costs globally. To puck the trend, we worked hard through the year to build value for our customers without simply increasing our prices.
In October, we announced the change of our primary currency from US Dollars (USD) to Euros (EUR) coming at the start of 2023. Most of our current customers use Euro as a payment currency and the change brings vital advantages to our customers, such as improved costs, expense planning, predictability, and removal of uncertainties of currency fluctuations, as well as the streamlined invoice and payment processes. We’re dedicated to our mission to provide our customers with superior customer support and products.
With the new price comes a better product. We launched new High CPU and High Memory server plans with dedicated capabilities. This enables our customers to take advantage of faster processing and improved performance, as well as provide better services to their customers. From January 1st 2023 onwards, we’ll also introduce complimentary upgrades to our server plans and, as mentioned, adjust product pricing.
We’re looking forward to exploring what 2023 has in store for us all. Antti Vilpponen, CEO of UpCloud, shared some words about the upcoming year:
I look forward to 2023 with curiosity and lots of ambition. It will be a year that will make our transition as a company towards cloud-native customers a reality with the launching of our own Managed Kubernetes service, among others.
Antti Vilpponen, CEO of UpCloud
So make sure to stay tuned for future milestones and updates during the year. If you haven’t yet, we recommend everyone subscribe to our monthly newsletter to never miss an announcement.
Happy New Year to all!
