I love writing about features that take only a few sentences to introduce! Today, I am excited to tell you about Cloud 66 Secrets. Frankly, there is not much I can write about, because this is a feature that's easy to understand for all developers and we made it so easy to use that you will be up and running in minutes. But I'm going to try and write everything you might need to know about Cloud 66 Secrets here, so let's go!

Today I am very happy to announce the general availability of Blue Green and Canary releases for Kubernetes on Cloud 66. Allowing Blue Green and Canary releases for Kubernetes is the result of months of hard work by the team here at Cloud 66 and I am very pleased with the results. We wanted our Blue Green and Canary releases to be simple to use and I think we have found the sweet spot between flexibility and ease of use. Today we are also rolling out Preview deployments to GA for all our customers.

Feature flags are a way to affect how your application behaves at runtime, without having to deploy new code. As the name suggests, they can be used to switch certain features on or off depending on a specified rule. A type of feature flag you have probably already encountered can be implemented as simple environment variables. Consider the following code you typically find in every Rails app’s production.rb.

After AWS and DigitalOcean, Hetzner Cloud is the third popular cloud provider with our customers. At the time of writing, around 9% of our customers deploy their applications on Hetzner. Our customers love their simple and straight forward product and pricing as well as their affordable bare-metal options. Over the past few months, many of our Hetzner customers reached out to us with complains of deployment failures.

Friends of this blog know that I am a big fan of building internal tools, or as we call them, "tools that help scale people". As the name suggests, internal tools are used, well, internally and as such usually will require their access to be restricted to the company's staff and network. In the past, I've written about how to use Tailscale for authentication of internal tools using HTTP. In this post, I will show you how to use Tailscale for gRPC authentication in Golang.

Today we have rolled out a change in the way you can configure each deployment of your application. Normally you deploy your apps, using the Deploy button on the top right corner of your application page. This will deploy your application based on the "default" Deployment Profile. You can also customize your deployment, using the "Deploy with Options" item on the deploy menu. With today's rollout, we've made improvements to this flow.

This blog post aims to dissect the various deployment options available for Rails applications in 2024, emphasizing the choice between native and containerized approaches. It dives into the advantages and drawbacks of each method and explores the hosting options available for each. Let’s dive right in!

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is a cost-effective email service provided by AWS. It is by far the cheapest option available out there. Comparing the cost of sending emails with SES and other services like SendGrid or Mailchimp, it can be 100x cheaper. However there is a catch. Using SES directly, you will not get some of the features you might need to control the bounce rate of your emails.

JWT is a popular way for authentication and authorization, especially for service to service communications. When it comes to internal tools, distribution and renewal of JWT can become a challenge. Our internal support systems use JWT to authenticate and authorize access and they are written in a few different languages and run on different hosting options.

We’ve been busy building a few features that are going to be very useful for teams at larger companies using Cloud 66: Automatic User Provisioning and SAML SSO.