Posted on 4.2.2020

Thrilling milestones on the roadmap for the year 2020

UpCloud

The start of a new year, and a new decade at that, brings much for us to be excited about. Not only did we recently announce our largest investment round to date but we are already busy putting the funding to good use! Team UpCloud is going to be growing substantially in the coming months as we add new exceptional talent to help us realise our vision for the future. With that in mind, we wanted to start the year by sharing what we have planned!

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Last year, we set a high bar for ourselves by announcing big plans for the year and our team accomplished a lot with new features and updates. This year our plans are even more grandiose! In this post, we’ll be giving you a glimpse of at what you can look forward to in the coming months.

Our plans include a bunch of new features and services:

  • New storage options to support more use cases
  • Ease-of-use services to help simplify configurations
  • Advanced options for cloud server deployments
  • New data centres in multiple regions

If these piqued your interest, read ahead to find out more about what to look forward to in 2020 at UpCloud!

New services to simplify your infrastructure

We’ve long had a focus on simplicity and ease-of-use across our services while still offering a lot of flexibility. As one of the strengths of our cloud infrastructure, it’s easy to get started on but customisable enough for advanced use cases. In an effort to make deploying new applications and services on UpCloud as seamless as possible, we are going to be introducing new features and services to offer everything you might need on one platform!

Simple Backup

We’ve offered manual on-demand and automated scheduled backups for a long time to help our users protect their cloud data. However, managing backups by hand or configuring desired schedules, as well as getting a grasp of the costs can still be a hurdle. Therefore, we’ve been building a new easier way of securing your business-critical data with Simple Backup!

Simple Backup is the perfect companion for your cloud server. Much like how our Simple server plans package cloud server configuration to make them easy and straightforward, the new Simple Backup gives you an easy-to-use solution for the peace of mind on data safety. It safeguards your data by saving multiple snapshots of your precious data automatically on the background.

Frequent backups allow you to restore just the right version without reverting hours of hard work. Meanwhile, longterm backups can bring back files thought lost in cyberspace. Simple Backup gives you the option to save a full year of data history with a multitude of concurrently available backups. With Simple Backup, you will always have a backup of the data you are looking for up to a year from any changes to the data.

Simple Backup is nearly ready for the launch and you can expect to hear more about it in the near future!

Load balancer service

Simple services run perfectly on simple solutions but once you need something with real flexibility you’ll want to distribute your infrastructure between multiple cloud servers. However, you’ll still want to offer easy access through a single entry point, and that’s where a load balancer comes in.

Load balancing is essential in building resilient systems as well as invaluable in enabling horizontal scaling. Although setting up a load balancer on a cloud server yourself is already possible and the go-to-solution for more advanced environments, the new load balancing service is going to greatly simplify the setup while offering much the same possibilities for configuration.

Load balancer services are also part of our push to build upon the SDN infrastructure. With solid foundations already laid, the final stretch of development is not far off.

DNS service

Domain names enable human-readable addresses across the internet. They are an important part of any web service and require due care when configuring. With the goal of making deploying your web site onto UpCloud as seamless as possible, we’ll be introducing a new DNS service to bring all your infrastructure controls onto one platform!

The new features will be integrated right into your UpCloud control panel for easy setup while also accessible via the UpCloud API for automation. Grow your infrastructure with ease by having a new sub-domain already configured by the time you are done deploying a new cloud server. DNS service will allow you to manage all the name server records you need to build successful web services!

The development for the new DNS service is already ongoing and the service will be launched once ready.

Metadata service

The flexibility of cloud servers enables a multitude of use cases, many of which often require deploying 2 or more cloud servers. While we already offer initialization scripts to help automate configurations at first boot, we want to make the deployment process even more configurable. With that goal in mind, we are working to offer metadata service to enable more flexibility in bootstrapping at cloud servers at deployment.

Metadata service is an industry-standard way to handle users’ cloud server setup at the initiation phase. It aims to improve deployment times by bringing needed configurations in place faster. Forget about manually serving configuration after bootup and save time in bootstrapping new cloud servers. Metadata will also allow new user-specific customisations with greater flexibility than custom templates can afford.

Implementing metadata service will be a major upgrade akin to the new distributed management architecture. The changes are already in development and will be announced in a not too distant future!

Enterprise-level features for SMEs

Building a business on the best infrastructure gives an instant leg up on the competition and we want UpCloud to be just that for all SMEs. With that goal in mind, we are developing new exciting features that are growing in importance to many business orientated use cases.

Object storage

A real block storage service is often an add-on and a costly option with other providers, some of whom offer only ephemeral storage as standard. However, every server on UpCloud uses highly available block storage by default. Furthermore, thanks to our blazingly fast MaxIOPS storage technology, there are very few others competing even in the same league. But being simply the fastest is still not good enough. That’s why we’ve been working hard to bring you more options with the new object storage!

Object storage arranges the blocks of data that make up a file together combined with all of the associated metadata in a single data object. This approach eliminates the need for a hierarchical structure used in traditional file storage. Due to the flat file space, object storage provides exciting possibilities for data analytics. In addition, the ability to store a data object anywhere within a data pool makes object storage technology extremely powerful together with the flexibility of our cloud storage.

On top of the advantages of being able to perform custom analytics on data use, the flat address space allows the pool to be easily scaled by simply adding more storage. Even those whose use case might traditionally shy away from object storage will want to give it a try!

Although we had planned to launch object storage already by the end of 2019, it was not quite ready and needed a little more time to be it just right. Stay tuned for more info coming soon.

SDN improvements

SDN itself was one of the largest network infrastructure upgrades we’ve done. It is already in use at every data centre today and will be available on day one at new locations when they launch!

We continue to work to improve our networking and SDN is an important building block which we will be developing further. As already mentioned, we’ll be offering new features enabled by SDN like load balancing. However, this is not the extent of the upcoming features. We have more in planning with other networking related services coming when ready.

New data centres to many regions

As we already mentioned when announcing the recent investment, we have plans to launch more than 10 new data centres in the coming 24 months. A number of these will be coming this year with new cities and regions.

You can expect to see new data centres launching in:

  • Europe
  • US East Coast
  • India
  • Australia

We want to be able to serve users in all parts of the world with data centres closer to your customers. New data centres will increase our cloud infrastructure availability in the existing regions as well as allow us to expand even more globally!

While we cannot yet reveal the exact locations or number of new locations, we are investing heavily in bringing our services to new cities and regions. Stay tuned on our usual announcement channels to learn more in due time.

More to come

We have big plans for the future and the investor funding enables us to really speed up our growth. With new exceptional talent joining us all the time, we are empowering our teams to develop new features and services faster than ever before while still ensuring the same quality of service you’ve come to expect from UpCloud.

Although we cannot yet share exact timetables for the new features, make sure to stay tuned for new roadmap announcements on our blog and follow us on social media. Lastly, we always love to hear your ideas and requests for new features and services. Don’t hesitate to reach out via live chat, email or tweet @UpCloud!

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Janne Ruostemaa

Editor-in-Chief

  1. Is there no plans for managed kubernetes? All the bigger cloud providers are offering that today which will be how most services are ran in the future.

  2. Janne Ruostemaa

    Hi Steff, thanks for the question. While we do not have anything to announce about managed Kubernetes just yet, rest assured we understand the importance of such service and it’s on our radar.

  3. I am also interested in this and hoping I could get pinged once we have more news regarding kubernetes support.

  4. Pekka Partanen

    Are you planning to provide seamless resource scaling in terms of CPU, memory and storage increase/decrease? Now all scaling requires the resource shutdown and startup causing a service break. Building a duplicated server setup for all services for resource scaling is too heavy operation.

  5. Janne Ruostemaa

    Hi Pekka, thanks for the question. While we do not have anything immediate to announce on this front we appreciate the request. In the meanwhile, depending on your setup, cloning the existing server for horizontal scaling should be relatively simple.

  6. Klayton Bailey

    I would also love to see this. I was talking with the folks at ArangoDB today, and they said that this was their main barrier to integrating with other cloud providers outside of Amazon/Google/Microsoft. It would be great to not have to pay absurdly higher amounts for what appears to be a slower service.

  7. When is the India DC coming, would really help us a lot!

  8. Janne Ruostemaa

    Hi there, thanks for the question. Health concerns and travel restrictions due to COVID-19 have slowed down our schedule for new data centres but the India DC is still planned. Stay tuned for future updates!

  9. When is the India DC gonna launch?

    Singapore is unreliable not due to Upcloud DC, but due to network breakages.

    We’ve been waiting for India DC for sometime now and waiting for migration of our customer to a Cloud Provider inside India.

    There’s Linode/Digitalocean and a ton others, but these are utterly unreliable and doesn’t match the performance of Upcloud.

    Please let me know if India DC is on the cards, so that we can make a decision for migration.

  10. Janne Ruostemaa

    Hi Anoop, thanks for the question. While we do not have anything new to announce on this front just yet, new data centres are in the works!

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