Cloud Notes – your cloud notebook for ideas and thoughts

A simple, built in notes application simply on the right place. That is what Cloud Notes adds to our new control panel. You can write down short notes regarding your servers and infrastructure and you’ll always find them handy, right beside your cloud management. The tool started as an internal addition to the control panel. We were looking for the fastest way to store some small amount of useful information about servers. And while notes, reminders and such types of applications are extremely common, having this nice little tool right into the cloud control panel appears to be very helpful. Keep track of some configuration, save some notes for later on, write down an issue you’ve encountered. Just like a little notebook in your backpack when you’re visiting the data center.

Best of all Cloud Notes is not a paper, so it doesn’t cost anything. It’s free!

You can find Cloud Notes in the middle of the left sidebar in your control panel. Just start a new note, write down something and click save. It can be anything from just a few words to a full configuration, snippet from a server log or simply a description of a brilliant idea you just got while you were starting your new server. Later on you can improve it.

Notes is your modern quick way to put down your ideas and thoughts.

Debian 9.6 has been released

The new point release of the Debian distribution has just been released. As a point release, it includes updates and adjustments on security issues and bugs. This release is not an entirely new version and any Debian 9 can be upgraded to include those patches.

The new release is already available on CloudBalkan.

Command line client for CloudBalkan API

We are to share with a nice little tool with a big potential. The CloudBalkan Command-Line Interface enables you to list and manage your servers, domains and storage drives through a simple set of commands. It provides a basic functionality for cloud automation tasks. We share it although it is still in very early development, because we see a huge interest in it. Also feel free to share your thoughts and recommendations.

You’ll find the tool in our public Github repository:

https://github.com/cloudbalkan/cb_cli

How to install Ansible on Ubuntu

Ansible is one of the most popular and well supported automation frameworks to date. It allows you to manage your servers and applications configuration with sets of tasks, arranged in so called playbooks, by simply defining the desired end state. Ansible playbooks are basically YAML files in which the user defines those tasks, the states and commands to be executed. An Ansible playbook is typically executed on multiple targets, from a single point by using just an SSH connection.

To start using Ansible you’ll need to install only on a single server that you’ll be using for the execution of playbooks. In this article we’ll go through the steps to install the latest version of Ansible on an Ubuntu server.

Installation

To install the latest version you will need to add an custom PPA repository.

sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install software-properties-common 
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible

Then you can simply run the apt update:

sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install ansible

Once the installation is complete, you can start using the set of Ansible application:

ansible             ansible-connection  ansible-doc         ansible-inventory   ansible-pull        ansible-vault
ansible-config      ansible-console     ansible-galaxy      ansible-playbook    ansible-test

2018-10-01 10:28:50 | Network Service Interruption

We are having an upstream networking issue.
This might affect connectivity to cloud servers and some other services. We’ll keep you updated in this thread.
[UTC] 10:30:59 – First alarm of network interrupt is received. It appears to be an issue in one of our Internet upstreams.
To be updated.
[UTC] 11:01:58 – Last change of alarm state. All services are reported up.
RCA:
To be updated.
Measures taken:
To be updated.