CodeRed.cloud News

[vsalvino]

This issue contains news on platform updates and features, in lieu of a traditional newsletter.

Subscribe to this issue to receive notifications whenever we post an update! You can also subscribe the old-fashioned way to our email list here.

[vsalvino]

February 13, 2020

We're nearing launch of the beta! Right now we just have two development sprints remaining until releasing the first public beta. Today we sent out our first email blast as well to those who have taken our surveys or signed up on https://app.codered.cloud/.

Work Completed

Work that has already been implemented over the past year since inception of our hosting platform:

• CodeRed CMS, Django, Wagtail, WordPress, and static sites.
• MySQL/MariaDB database backend.
• Automated encrypted backups taken daily or ad-hoc.
• Schedule jobs (i.e. cron jobs).
• Push-button deployments.
• Automatic SSL for any domain, on by default.
• Dashboard for customers to manage their hosted web apps and domains.

And the newest feature that was just completed is our "create a new web app" screen. Check out how easy it is to launch a Wagtail site in just 3 steps! I'm hoping to post a screencast of the whole process soon.

Work Currently in Progress

Upcoming work taking place during Sprint 14:

• Shore up PostgreSQL 11 support.
• Customers can self-add custom domains to their hosted web apps without needing to contact our support. SSL is automatically created for your custom domain name by default!
• Create public documentation, help, and how-to guides. We're inspired by the excellent documentation of Digital Ocean and the legendary Stripe API.
• Lots of under-the-hood improvements and hardening of our platform.

[vsalvino]

February 27, 2020

We're entering our final sprint before sending out an initial batch of beta invites!

Work Completed

• PostgreSQL 11 is up and running.
• Customers can add their own custom domain name from our dashboard.
• We've created the "CodeRed Dev Center" to house public documentation, how-to guides, and technical information. Writing high quality guides and tutorials for using our platform, and for all things Django related, is our top priority to make the developer experience second to none!

Work Currently in Progress

Upcoming work taking place during Sprint 15:

• Write a boat-load of documentation.
• Shore up the billing experience.
• Enable customers to download backups on demand without contacting our support.
• Finalize exact pricing and features of each plan level.

[vsalvino]

May 14, 2020

I know we've been quiet over the past couple months, having shifted gears a bit to help our customers deal with the COVID pandemic. But we've been hard at work on CodeRed Cloud and are now excited to be opening up the beta into phase 2, which includes you!

Beta schedule

1. Private beta (started around May 1): Invited a small number of testers.
2. Public beta (started May 14): Opened beta up to a larger group - everyone who has signed up on our website. This phase will last for a few months.
3. Public release (estimated start August 2020): Current beta plans will be converted to a more permanent free tier, and paid plans will begin.

Our vision is to build the absolute simplest Django web hosting service - so your feedback (both good and bad) is invaluable. Each beta tester will get 1 free site hosted with the Professional plan, and 1 free site with the Personal plan. While the underlying hosting service is rock-solid and suitable for production websites - the dashboard and documentation are very much in beta. If you encounter an issue, please report it to our support, or here on GitHub.

After you create an account and start hosting some sites, we may reach out to you individually to provide feedback or answer a survey. And of course, you can reach out to us any time via our customer support.

Sign up

If you're reading this issue, you're invited to try out the platform.

Sign up at: https://app.codered.cloud/register/
Docs: https://www.codered.cloud/docs/

We'll continue updating this issue as we release new features to the platform. In the mean time - check it out, and have fun!

[vsalvino]

August 18, 2020

This release brings a handful of bug fixes and improvements to the CodeRed Cloud dashboard.

New features

New account management! This enables customers to update their user profile, create and manage multiple clients/organizations, and share access by inviting other users. Account management is heavily designed for agencies who often manage many different clients. Websites belong to clients, not users. Access and billing information is assigned at the client level.

My account, manage my organizations:

Organization details:

Fixes

• Fixes and improvements to deploy, restart, and clone operations.
• Improve UI when creating a new website on various screen sizes.
• Internal upgrades to key vault / secrets management.
• Fix bugs where some users cannot load the website dashboard.

Coming soon...

Some really exciting features are already in the works for our next update. These include:

• Database tools - Ability to access your database externally using standard mysql / psql tools.
• Environment variables - Ability to manage custom environment variables per prod/staging environments.
• Migration guide - a highly detailed step-by-step guide for moving existing Django, Wagtail, and WordPress websites to CodeRed.
• Command-line tool - this will enable the ability to do automated deployments right from your terminal, or from continuous integrations!

[vsalvino]

September 8, 2020

This release brings some new major features to CodeRed Cloud!

Database Access

There's a new tab in the dashboard! Say hello to "Database". We have enabled the ability to connect directly to your database using the mysql or psql (or your favorite) client. Security is of course paramount, so passwords are securely generated and are rotated each time your app is deployed, and the connection requires TLS encryption.

Custom Environment Variables

Under the Settings tab, you can now add custom environment variables for both production and staging environments. These are treated with SECRET level clearance and are therefore stored encrypted in a Key Vault and decrypted dynamically at runtime.

Download Backups

Daily backups of your app, from both production and staging, can now be downloaded from the dashboard. Backups from the past 7 days ("hot") are instantly downloadable - long-term backups ("archive") from the past 180 days can be requested by contacting support.

Migration Guides

This release also includes a slew of documentation, including a working migration guide for both Django-based apps and WordPress sites.

• Migration guide
• New database docs
• Plans/features matrix updates

Coming soon...

• Security & patch notifications - get email notifications whenever a security update has been applied or is available.
• Command-line tool - this will enable the ability to do automated deployments right from your terminal, or from continuous integrations!

[vsalvino]

September 7, 2022

Welcome back to a fresh edition of CodeRed Cloud Developer News! It’s been a while since we posted any updates, however our development team has not slowed down! Here’s a recap of some big milestones we have hit over the past year.

Latest & greatest Python and PHP versions

We continually add the latest Python and PHP versions as Django and WordPress support them. Currently this includes Python 3.10 and PHP 8.0. Python 3.11 and PHP 8.1 are just around the corner!

Deployment log

You can now see a live stream of the current deployment from within the Dashboard. You can also see a list of past deployments and other operations such as: backups, clones, password resets, etc. which have been initiated through the dashboard.

Faster deployments with faster pip install

When deploying your site or starting a new site, the pip install process accounts for the largest amount of time. We have massively sped this up by adding a local file-based cache of PyPI. This means installation of common packages does not even invoke the network and works directly from the local filesystem. We′re seeing end-to-end Django deployment times around 21 seconds and Wagtail deployment times around 48 seconds!

Sentinel security

We often joke that a huge percentage of all traffic on the internet is from bots. This is not actually a joke! One of the biggest problems facing our customers’ website performance was being attacked or probed by malicous bots. Our new Sentinel protection:

• Automaticaly rate limits requests to your site.
• Specially protects the Django, Wagtail, and WordPress admin URLs.
• Temporarily blocks suspicous IP addresses.
• Sits in front of your website and requires no code changes.

In tandem with this, we have made several updates to our popular wagtail-cache package to reduce the performance impact of bot traffic such as repeated 404s or probed/generated querystring arguments.

On-demand backups

You can now take and download backups of your site on-demand directly from the Dashboard. This makes it super convenient to take backups in between deployments or to download an up-to-date snapshot of production.

Permanent free tier

Our beta program has concluded. A big THANK YOU to everyone who participated! Beta users will keep their free accounts as-is for the time being.

With this we have also introduced a permanent Free Tier. Now anyone can sign up for CodeRed Cloud, no credit card required, and launch their first Django, Wagtail, or WordPress site instantly. Free accounts also include a MariaDB or Postgres database - plus everything else you need to run a website.

View Plans & Pricing

Enterprise tier

We have also been busy rolling out the Enterprise Tier for large customers. Enterprise plans are customized and include dedicated servers and custom firewall rules. This essentially acts like your own private cloud - Enterprise customers can report on capacity of their dedicated infrastructure and manage all webapps across their organization.

Another big THANK YOU to our early adopter Enterprise customers!

View Plans & Pricing

[vsalvino]

October 15, 2022

CodeRed Cloud CLI

This highly anticipated feature is finally here! With our new cr command line tool you can easily deploy Django, Wagtail, WordPress, or static sites with a single command!

Deploy from GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps, and more

Simply copy/paste our YAML templates to automate your deployments to CodeRed Cloud.

Python & PHP security updates

The latest September security releases are available, including Python 3.10.7 and PHP 8.1.11.

See you at Djangocon US

CodeRed is excited to sponsor Djangocon US this year. Stop by our booth and say hello. See you in San Diego!