German Accelerator 2018
The German Accelerator Tech empowers German tech startups to successfully enter the U.S. market. This year about 800 startups have applied for the German Accelerator to take advantage of the extensive program. The winners will enjoy many different workshops, customized mentoring and get access to the German Accelerator network.
Out of all 800 participants, 17 finalists were nominated and 7 of them were declared winners of the German Accelerator on April 26 - and we won!
From July a part of our team will spend (at least) three months in New York and face the U.S. market. We are excited and are looking forward to our time in the United States.
Last year's top 3 Blog Posts
We look back on an eventful and very successful year in 2017.
Many thanks to all readers of our Blog for your support and valuable feedback!
In the following we would like to present you our three most popular Blog Posts of the last year:
No 1: Our Top 5 instant benefits of the Java to Kotlin transition
Kotlin gained a lot of attention in the end last year. Our employee Stefan Tomm tells about his experiences with Kotlin at meshcloud and points our the five largest advantages when moving from Java to Kotlin.
No 2: No Pets Allowed – Embracing the Cloud is More Than Server Virtualization
Everyone talks about Cloud - but what are the main advantages of this technology and how does it differ from traditional server virtualization.
No 3: Deploying Concourse CI on OpenStack using Docker
Continuous Integration und Continuous Delivery are the key for a successful automation of your application deployments. In this post we explain how to set up a Concourse CI Server with Docker in an Open Stack Cloud environment.
We are looking forward to a new year with a lot of new posts oncloud-native applications, microservice architectures, Continuous Integration and Delivery, Docker and Kubernetes.
We wish you a great start into a successful year 2018.
Do you have any wishes for new topics? Feel free to leave a comment.
December Release Notes (2017)
We are happy to introduce you to a couple of new features that we have been working on in the past couple of weeks. We hope you'll enjoy them.
OpenStack upgrade
We upgraded our platform from OpenStack Mitaka to Ocata in september. This change has improved platform stability and will enable us to include further services soon. Stay tuned, we will let you know.
Improved Cloud Foundry integration
If you already are a regular Cloud Foundry user, you probably have realized that accessing the Cloud Foundry CLI from our meshPanel has become much easier. Clicking the “Get Passcode”-Link will directly display the Passcode that you need to authenticate against the Cloud Foundry CLI. All intermediate steps have been removed.
Improved resource statistics
To give you a better overview on your resource usage, we extended our stats section in your project dashboard. You now have an overview at first glance on what is running in your project.
Bind volumes to instances via meshPanel
You are now able to create volumes and bind them to your instances via our meshPanel. There is no need to use the OpenStack CLI for this anymore.
Change security groups of running instances
Flexibly add or remove security groups from your running VMs from our meshPanel. It might have happened to you that you created a VM and forgot to make some ports accessible that you need for later use. You can now flexibly edit the security groups related to each of your instances.
New Features on meshcloud: August Release Notes (2017)
Instead of a lazy summer break we were working on a couple of great new features for you. We hope you enjoy them. Don't forget, we are always happy to get your feedback and improve your cloud experience continuously.
New Feature: OpenStack Swift
We have a new feature running on meshcloud: Object Storage with OpenStack Swift. Start creating containers and storing files now.
Our Backup Service is online
Great news: You are now able to automatically backup your Cloud Foundry databases to an OpenStack Swift Container. This feature is available for PostgreSQL and MongoDB.
Ready to get your automated deployments started
Our new panel functionality to create Service Users for OpenStack and Cloud Foundry gets you ready for automated deployments. Creating a Service User provides you with credentials that you can use in your continuous integration pipelines
Access your databases from outside Cloud Foundry
In some cases you may want to access your Cloud Foundry Service Databases from a local client or an app outside of Cloud Foundry. Our new Service Dashboard lets you create and manage your Service Keys.
Executive Order weakens US data protection for foreigners
US President Donald Trump signed an executive order, which could further weaken the data protection level for non-US citizens (as reported by heise.de). Section 14 of the order of January 25 states:
Sec. 14. Privacy Act. Agencies shall, to the extent consistent with applicable law, ensure that their privacy policies exclude persons who are not United States citizens or lawful permanent residents from the protections of the Privacy Act regarding personally identifiable information.
This means US agencies shall not apply privacy regulations to foreigners. This might threaten the new Privacy Shield agreement between the EU and the US which requires a data protection level comparable to EU standards in order to allow transfer of personal data to the US. Companies might therefore face legal uncertainties in future when they process personal data under US legislation. To avoid those risks, European companies should rely on European infrastructure providers solely.
Further details at heise.de (in German).
mesh– what?
What is meshcloud about?
Well, about cloud obviously. But to mesh means to take cloud to the next level: We strive to turn cloud infrastructure into what it should be – flexible, ready-to-use modules you plug together to build a solution for your requirements while keeping full control over resources and costs. Therefore, we build a mesh in two dimensions: Different providers across the world offer their hardware for our services and connect their locations with our cloud federation. In each of these locations, we provide a cloud stack to our customers with services on different layers – IaaS, PaaS for now and possibly more in the future. Welcome to meshcloud – the open cloud federation.
Who we are and what we do
At first sight, we are all connected by attending TU Darmstadt at some stage of our academic career. But at a closer look, we all contribute quite different personalities, experiences and backgrounds to our project. Still, we all share the same ambition and excitement about our project and its purpose. We will add information about our progress and offers on this website, so please make sure to sign up to stay updated.
About this blog
meshcloud makes cloud computing pleasant and easy to handle. As a contribution, we will use this blog to share experiences that we make on our way and to shed light on technical challenges that come up during our work. In this way, we want to let you benefit from our learnings, help you be successful in cloud technologies and to give back to the community which creates so many great open source software projects.
That's us. Up in the clouds :-)
