February 2024 Summaries

Upsun has introduced a 3% discount for users who deploy their projects to data centers located in six designated "greener regions," which have a grid carbon intensity score of less than 100 g CO2 eq/KWh, as part of an initiative to support sustainability and reduce carbon footprints. This discount applies to application CPU, application memory, service CPU, service memory, and build resources at the project level, but not to project fees or storage costs. Starting in March 2024, when creating a new project on Upsun, users can choose eligible regions marked with a green-leaf icon to benefit from this discount, and existing projects can be manually migrated to these regions. Users can verify the application of the discount via the project's billing page, and Upsun encourages users to reach out to their support team if they encounter any issues.

Platform.sh has announced a Greener Region Discount, a first in the cloud industry, offering a 3% discount for customers who choose to deploy their applications in greener data centers with carbon intensities of less than 100 gCO₂eq/kWh. This initiative, available through Upsun, Platform.sh's new PaaS launching in April 2024, aligns with the company's commitment to reduce carbon emissions and support environmentally conscious development. By partnering with Azure, AWS, GCP, and OVH, Platform.sh provides eligible data center regions in France, Sweden, Switzerland, Canada, and the U.S., encouraging clients to optimize costs while reducing their carbon footprint. This strategy is part of a broader commitment to sustainability and is supported by accurate carbon intensity data from Electricity Maps. Currently in Open Beta, Upsun highlights Platform.sh’s ongoing dedication to ESG principles, offering enhanced cloud orchestration to over 6,000 enterprise clients, including notable brands like Adobe and UNICEF.

In this blog chapter, Ori Pekelman discusses the transformative impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) on the open web and software development landscape, highlighting 2023 and 2024 as pivotal years for these technologies. The text explores the evolving relationship between digital infrastructure and open source, suggesting that AI-assisted software development could significantly alter traditional coding roles and practices. Despite fears of reduced developer roles, Pekelman argues that the nature of coding and software processes will change rather than shrink, with AI and low-code frameworks influencing this evolution. The cyclical nature of IT is examined, noting historical shifts in programming languages, architectures, and data stores, with the current trend moving towards platform engineering and flexible self-service Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions like Upsun. The piece emphasizes the importance of balancing creativity and control, advocating for pragmatic approaches that embrace automation and flexibility without sacrificing security or compliance, as AI continues to reshape assumptions about open source and commoditization in the tech industry.

Gevent is a Python networking library offering asynchronous programming capabilities through the use of greenlets and an event loop, providing a less complex alternative to traditional multithreading. The library is inspired by Eventlet and is ideal for high-performance networking applications, allowing for concurrent execution without relying on OS threads. However, developers should be aware of common pitfalls such as the need for monkey patching, which replaces blocking standard library calls with cooperative ones, and its limitations in making third-party libraries asynchronous. Gevent is not well-suited for CPU-intensive tasks, as these can block greenlets from executing, and shared resource access can lead to subtle issues unless carefully managed. While Gevent simplifies asynchronous programming, understanding its limitations and adhering to best practices is crucial for effective use in applications.

The blog post details a WordPress migration project from Platform.sh to Upsun, illustrating the steps involved in configuring and transferring a WordPress art portfolio. The process starts with setting up the project by cloning the Platform.sh repository and creating a new Upsun project. Key differences in configuration between the two platforms are highlighted, such as the use of a resources API on Upsun instead of YAML and the transition from local to storage mounts for data sharing across multiple app instances. The author explains how to migrate data, including database and file uploads, while noting that Upsun automatically applies default resource settings during the initial push. The post also suggests ways to optimize resource allocation and encourages readers to join the Upsun community for support and sharing experiences.

Upsun is committed to providing greener cloud hosting by offering transparency in carbon intensities of its data centers, allowing users to choose the most environmentally friendly locations for their projects. This initiative is supported by data from Electricity Maps (EM), which uses updated methodologies and additional data sources compared to the International Energy Agency (IEA), ensuring more accurate carbon intensity measurements. EM's approach aligns with scientific consensus and incorporates zone-specific emission factors from the European Commission and the US Environmental Protection Agency, reinforcing Upsun's dedication to sustainability. By adopting EM data, Upsun and its partner Platform.sh enhance their commitment to reducing digital carbon footprints through informed hosting decisions, supported by open-source data and free access to historical carbon intensity information.

The blog post by Michael Sharp delves into the complexities of nesting location blocks within NGINX configurations, highlighting the different types of location blocks—exact-match, plain, strong prefix, and regex—and how they interact within the configuration file. It emphasizes that NGINX processes these blocks by scanning from top to bottom to find the most suitable match for a request, with exact-match locations taking precedence and terminating the search immediately if found. Prefix-type locations, which cannot be nested within regex-type locations, are examined first, and if no exact match is found, NGINX then tests regex-type locations. The author points out exceptions where regex locations are considered, particularly if they are nested within a matching prefix-type block, and notes that strong-prefix locations (^~) will not check regex locations unless they are nested. The post encourages readers to share their insights and experiences with NGINX configurations, acknowledging the complexity and depth involved in mastering its nuances.

After a four-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, dotConferences is set to return in June 2024, with the support of Platform.sh (now Upsun) and Welcome to the Jungle, aiming to reestablish Paris as a key tech hub and support the European developer ecosystem. This collaboration seeks to revive the prestigious series of events that have historically attracted over 24,000 participants since 2012, offering insights into popular programming languages and technologies such as Javascript, Python, and AI. Under the guidance of Nessrine Berrama, dotConferences plans to host three major events focusing on technological revolutions, providing a platform for thought leaders and fostering community engagement. The initiative aims to address the evolving needs of developers amid industry changes and to enhance their skills through premium content and expert interactions, while also expanding the reach of these conferences to other European tech hubs as part of an internationalization effort.

Upsun's initiative to migrate its customer dashboard, Console, from JavaScript to TypeScript has been a significant and ongoing project, spanning over a year and a half. This transition, while theoretically simple, involves various complexities, such as modifying build scripts, changing file extensions, and deciding the level of TypeScript's strictness. The team has adopted strategies like converting independent "leaf" files first and central files early to facilitate smoother type inference and dependency management. Despite challenges like handling external packages without type information and adapting Git workflows to preserve file histories, the benefits have been substantial. These include early bug detection, increased code confidence, and the ability to catch issues before reaching production. Although the migration is not yet complete, the process has led to a more robust development environment, with TypeScript now being the default for new development. The migration has also necessitated changes in development tools and practices, leading to improved code quality and maintainability despite the project's complexities.

Upsun's unique architecture features a single-tenant daemon for its most critical API, which enhances isolation and security for each customer project, ensuring that issues in one project do not affect others and allowing seamless regional transitions and continuous deployment. This architecture, however, presents challenges in performance observability, which Upsun addresses using Blackfire, a tool specializing in application monitoring and profiling. Blackfire enables detailed insights into system performance by highlighting bottlenecks and inefficiencies through its visualizations and profiling capabilities, which have proven effective in identifying and resolving performance issues within Git, a core component of Upsun's workflow. By dogfooding, or using their tools internally, Upsun continuously refines its services, leveraging Blackfire's integration with Git and Python's Pyramid framework to monitor and optimize application performance. This approach has led to significant performance improvements, such as eliminating a redundant function that increased execution speed by 40%, demonstrating the value of combining monitoring and profiling for ongoing optimization.

Platform.sh has launched a new public region in Zurich, Switzerland, through Google Cloud, to help businesses meet sustainability, data localization, and compliance requirements, particularly in response to the revised Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection, which aligns with GDPR. This expansion caters to the growing demand from Swiss businesses and international companies with operations in Switzerland, emphasizing the region's reputation for technological innovation and sustainable energy use. With the increasing need for companies to report their environmental impact under the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, Platform.sh offers a greener cloud solution across seven regions in five countries. As a cloud-agnostic PaaS, it allows businesses to choose data storage locations to comply with complex regional data privacy laws while maintaining efficient customer service, exemplifying its commitment to sustainability and compliance in the face of evolving global regulations.