UpCloud’s development roadmap: What to look forward to in 2021

The year has turned, and UpCloud welcomes you to 2021, ready again to show you what the best cloud infrastructure can offer for your business.

The last year has proven the capabilities of our brand, products and most importantly, the strength of our teams. We’ve been happy to see many new users coming and staying with us. And moreover, we made several new partnerships which have led to new service offerings to our users.

After launching many new products and services last year, we have even bigger plans for what’s to come! In addition to continuing to improve existing services, we have several new projects under development. In this post, we are laying down the roadmap for 2021. You can especially look forward to:

• The new Managed Databases on UpCloud
• UpCloud Command-Line Client
• SDN Private network routing between data centres
• Further development of Terraform integration
• Updating UpCloud API SDKs
• Opening new data centres

Empowering SMBs and new businesses

Small and medium-sized enterprises have been at the centre of UpCloud’s focus for a long time. For a growing company, it is absolutely essential not to miss any business opportunities. One of UpCloud’s missions is to enable you to focus on these opportunities instead of technical challenges. That’s why we take into account the needs of SMBs when developing and prioritising new solutions. So that you can feel the operations getting easier on a daily basis and see it in your business results.

Along with new features and services, we are working on developing new tools and processes to create these new opportunities for partnerships. We’ve long recognised the clear need for reliable cloud infrastructure that other businesses can easily utilise to provide services to their customers. To that end, we launched our official partner program last year, which has since forged many successful partnerships.

This year, we will be expanding our partner program. We are building new solutions to enable businesses of all shapes and sizes to make the most of their cloud infrastructures, such as new databases and networking services.

Turn-key Managed Databases

Self-managing a database filled with business-critical data can be a daunting task even for the most battle-hardened Systems Operator. But why stretch yourself thin with added work when you have the opportunity to leverage years of experience from trained professionals? That’s why we have created a service which you can use to create High-availability databases without needing to worry what’s under the hood.

The new Managed Databases on UpCloud will enable you to take on even the most challenging projects while having the confidence that your data is secured. Not only do you get the best-in-business knowledge on databases, but also the unrivalled performance of our block storage with MaxIOPS!

The development of our joint offering is progressing well, and we expect to be able to showcase it quite soon. If you’d like us to take your databases to the next level, make sure you keep up-to-date on our latest news for all future announcements with our monthly newsletter.

Fully-featured SDN Routers

Truly private networking has been one of our unique selling points from the beginning. Starting with our Utility network and SDN Private Networks as a later addition, we’ve been building customizability on our private networking. And to continue the same efforts, we introduced our SDN Router feature which was made available free of charge in open beta.

SDN Routers can connect multiple SDN Private Networks quickly and easily without added complexity or manual network configuration. However, due to the limitations at the time, SDN Routers could only connect networks within the same data centre. This is going to change!

We are working on building the required networking infrastructure to enable SDN Routers, and therefore SDN Private Networks, to interconnect all of your UpCloud Cloud Servers across data centres. If you are yet to test our SDN networking features, don’t miss out on your chance to try the free beta. Head over to our tutorials on how to connect private networks using SDN Routers.

More tools for developers

As developers ourselves, we love a good toolkit that makes our work all the more efficient and productive. In return, we aim to provide our users with a wide range of tools to make developing on UpCloud as effortless as possible. At this time, we are especially focused on infrastructure as code, or IaC for short, in order to enable new ways for developers to build services on UpCloud.

UpCloud becomes a verified Terraform provider

Terraform is one of the best tools available for defining infrastructure as code, thanks to its wide adoptions across cloud services and providers. It enables you to take full control of your cloud resources with declarative configuration files. And thanks to our newly updated UpCloud Terraform provider, you can manage all of your UpCloud services with just a few simple commands.

Terraform is an integral part of our focus on supporting developers with advanced infrastructure management tools. Save precious time by adopting Terraform in your workflow. It is now even easier than before, thanks to our new status as a verified Terraform provider. Along with the verification, the UpCloud Terraform module is now available in the Terraform Registry. It is now installed automatically by Terraform if you declare it in your configuration files.

Through the year 2021, we will continue to develop our Terraform integration to include new features and services as they are released, as well as improve general functionality. If you are interested in seeing what Terraform can do for you or have already used it before, make sure to upgrade your UpCloud Terraform provider to get the latest features.

Command-Line Client for your cloud

One of the pitfalls of productivity is having to waste time on maintenance or other related tasks that nonetheless are necessary for enabling actual development. Although we’ve spent a lot of effort building the UpCloud Control Panel user friendly and easy to operate, there’s no beating the efficiency of good command-line tools in the right hands. Therefore, in a not too distant future, we will be launching the UpCloud Command-Line Client!

The UpCloud Command-Line Client will offer a new way of interacting with your cloud service while providing opportunities for automation and saving time. Anyone comfortable using a terminal will instantly find themselves familiar with the UpCloud CLI making common operations a breeze. When managing your cloud infrastructure takes but a minute, you’ll have a whole lot of newfound time to work on what really matters.

Building upon the UpCloud API SDKs

In addition to building tools for different ways of managing your cloud infrastructure on UpCloud, we also want to help you make your own integrations! We’ve continually developed a suite of API SDKs for the popular programming languages like Python, Go and PHP. These SDKs are going to receive a lot of attention going forward as we ramp up our development efforts.

The SDKs already available on our GitHub are actively used by other projects and tools such as Terraform, Ansible, and our Command-Line Client. With this approach, we will ensure the quality of these APIs, making them fully production-capable.

Growth across regions

In 2020, we kick-started our expansion which will only accelerate going forward. Many amazing people have joined our teams, bringing new vision and expertise to our global family. UpCloud has also successfully launched three new data centres that have set the performance standards for all our following openings. As computing technology progresses, we strive to stay at the forefront of the wave. Therefore, all new UpCloud data centres will feature the powerful AMD EPYC architecture.

Our recent launches in New York, Warsaw and Madrid have focused a bit more on our users in Europe and the USA. In 2021, however, we are reaching right across the globe. As a sneak peek of what’s to come, we can already reveal the next addition to UpCloud data centres will be located in sunny Sydney, Australia!

New data centres will increase our cloud infrastructure availability worldwide and improve accessibility in new regions. And rest assured, there are more data centres on the horizon for this year.

Besides expanding to new regions with our data centres, other exciting regional changes lie ahead for us. Even though we currently work mostly remotely, with the growing teams, we no longer fit into our existing offices. This actually makes us very happy as it indicates how much UpCloud has grown in such a short time. Therefore, we are relocating our Helsinki, London and Singapore teams to new modern premises. The new environment will both support creativity and wellbeing as well as suit our business needs in the future.

Stay in touch

As we listen to our users and innovate solutions gradually, many updates and releases will emerge throughout the year. Not all of them could fit here, but we’ll always keep you updated. Be sure to follow our blog or subscribe to our monthly newsletter to get more detailed information on all our new launches firsthand!