June 2024 Summaries

Platform.sh, a prominent Platform-as-a-Service provider, has been recognized for its sustainability efforts with two gold medals from EcoVadis and Greenly, placing it in the top 5% of companies assessed for corporate social responsibility. Through rigorous evaluations, Platform.sh demonstrated a 6% reduction in CO2 emissions from 2022 to 2023, driven by initiatives like optimized server density and location-based hosting powered by low-carbon grids. The company promotes transparency by providing customers with annual carbon footprint reports to help them understand and reduce their environmental impact. These efforts align with Platform.sh's commitment to a sustainable digital future and corporate social responsibility, further exemplified by their partnerships with major cloud providers and their involvement in initiatives like the European Union's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive.

Oris, a renowned Swiss watchmaker, partnered with the digital agency Liip to enhance their web and ecommerce platform by adopting Upsun's Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). This collaboration helped Oris consolidate its hosting providers and streamline its development processes using Upsun's container-based approach, robust command-line interface, and automated infrastructure management. Liip, which has been a dedicated Upsun customer for nine years, leveraged these features to deliver scalable, user-centric projects for Oris and other clients, ensuring quick setups and efficient resource management. The partnership also emphasized sustainability, with Oris opting for Upsun’s environmentally-friendly hosting region in Zurich, aligning with their commitment to sustainable practices. This long-term collaboration has allowed both companies to maintain a strategic, innovative edge in digital development while adhering to their values of excellence and sustainability.

The University of Missouri undertook a comprehensive six-year digital transformation to centralize and standardize its diverse web environments, initially scattered across 1,600 decentralized on-premises sites using various content management systems like Drupal and WordPress. By partnering with Upsun for cloud hosting, the university's Digital Service team significantly reduced website maintenance time by 75%, decreased annual hosting costs by 30%, and enhanced web performance, enabling the sites to handle three times more requests. This strategic move not only streamlined web operations through automation and standardized processes but also allowed the team to focus on higher-value projects such as reinforcing the university's brand and improving user experience. The transition involved educating a diverse developer community and implementing a more agile DevOps approach, ultimately resulting in a more efficient management system that supports more sites with fewer developers. The project has positioned the university to better meet its branding and operational goals, supporting the institution's broader objectives in the higher education sector.

Sylius and Platform.sh have collaborated to launch Sylius Cloud powered by Platform.sh, a new solution designed to simplify infrastructure management, customization, and scalability for ecommerce applications. Sylius, an open-source ecommerce framework based on Symfony, caters to mid-market and enterprise brands with its developer-friendly environment, supporting both B2C and B2B models and offering plugins like Sylius Plus to expedite implementation. This partnership leverages Platform.sh's advanced cloud hosting capabilities to provide a flexible and scalable solution suitable for developers, agencies, and large-scale merchants. The collaboration aims to deliver flexibility in cloud computing while allowing control over ecommerce-specific needs and data management. Platform.sh, now known as Upsun, boasts a wide-reaching presence with a commitment to sustainability and partnerships with major cloud providers, supporting a diverse clientele, including Adobe and UNICEF, across various industries.

Upsun introduces a transformative approach to software development with its instant data cloning feature, enabling developers to create exact replicas of production environments within minutes, which significantly enhances the development, testing, and deployment processes. This capability addresses the common challenges developers face, such as the complexity and time consumption of setting up accurate development environments, data inconsistencies, high maintenance costs, and risks of downtime. By utilizing a copy-on-write mechanism based on Ceph RBDs, Upsun ensures efficient and consistent replication without unnecessary data duplication, facilitating rapid environment setup, realistic testing conditions, isolated development, and improved debugging. The system's efficiency in snapshotting and synchronizing data provides a reliable and cost-effective solution, eliminating delays and resource consumption associated with traditional methods while maintaining data integrity and security. Consequently, Upsun's approach not only accelerates the software development cycle but also enhances collaboration, performance testing, disaster recovery, and stakeholder engagement, making it a valuable asset for development teams seeking to optimize their workflows.

In a conversation about digital sustainability in 2024, Leah Goldfarb of Platform.sh and Gerhard Andrey of Liip and the Swiss Green Party discussed the critical need for digital businesses to adopt progressive sustainability practices that consider ecological, social, and economic impacts. They highlighted the tech industry's significant contribution to global emissions and stressed the urgency of taking proactive measures, such as conducting comprehensive environmental impact assessments and optimizing cloud infrastructure to minimize energy consumption. Collaboration and transparency were emphasized as key strategies for driving industry-wide change, with both speakers optimistic about the cultural shift towards sustainability and the role of policy changes in fostering progress. The conversation served as a call to action for businesses to enhance their sustainability efforts, promising benefits beyond environmental impact, including improved brand reputation and customer loyalty. Platform.sh, now Upsun, exemplifies these efforts through partnerships with leading cloud providers and a commitment to a sustainable digital future.

Vinego is a new set of safety-focused Go analyzers developed by Upsun, designed to enhance code safety by rejecting certain idiomatic patterns in favor of more explicit and potentially safer alternatives. These linters, such as varinit, allfields, capturederr, explicitcast, and loopvariableref, aim to address issues like zero-value initialization, error handling, type mixups, and loop variable references. Varinit ensures all variables are explicitly initialized, avoiding unexpected zero values. Allfields requires all struct fields to be explicitly set, preventing overlooked zero values in partial struct literals. Capturederr flags improper error handling in nested functions, while explicitcast forces explicit type casting to prevent type safety issues. Although some linting solutions may flag legitimate code, they aim to fill significant safety gaps in Go development. Vinego is available on GitHub and can be integrated with golangci-lint for a comprehensive Go-building solution.