ClusterCS is proud to announce the v2.0 update is finally here. At ClusterCS, we value our customer’s feedback and the new update brings customer requested features, quality of life changes and various bugs fixes.
This year we are giving developers more tools to help them focus more on coding and less on preparing their work environment. The pricing plans have been simplified as well.
It’s a long list of updates, so please, bear with us until the end of the article to find out what awesome features you have at disposal to automate and manage your processes and what’s coming up in the near future.
Key Features:
1) Development Environments
The ‘Development Environments’ feature removes the time consuming action of creating another version of your domain for testing, e.g. CMS version updates, plug-in updates, etc.
Automate your development workflow. Create and migrate between live and development environments while working under the same website URL. ClusterCS can keep track of files and databases and automatically update configuration files with environment specific values.
You have the option to Clone, Merge and Push updates for your domain at a press of a button! GIT support is integrated as well for DevOps purposes.
2) Services Management
You can now see the major services running on your server (eg. apache, nginx, lighttpd, postfix etc) with the option to Stop/Restart/Start them directly from our Control Panel, without having to access the server. This will remove time spent in the terminal and give you better control over what’s happening on a server-level.
3) SSH Keys
ClusterCS recommends the use of SSH keys for accessing your server as a more secure alternative to key-phrase passwords.
You can now manage the SSH keys registered for your domain directly from our Control Panel. This feature allows you to also access GIT for the Development Environments (Dev Env) with ease.
Also this makes it easier for your Project Manager to restrict developers access to the server.
4) Transition to Vue.js 2.0
We’ve been working behind the scenes to modernize our development stack in order to improve the speed we’re delivering features to our customers and increase the reliability of our codebase.
To achieve this goal, new features have been developed on a new Vue 2.0 stack. You can already see this new codebase in action when using our new awesome features.
5) Easy script installers
This feature has been requested by our customers on many occasions and we have worked initially on a list of the most popular PHP scripts.
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- CMS Made Simple;
- CakePHP 3.7;
- Concrete5;
- Drupal 7 & 8;
- Joomla3;
- Laravel;
- Magento 2.3;
- OpenCart 3;
- PhpBB;
- Prestashop 1.7;
- WordPress;
- Yii,
6) PHP-FPM
PHP-FPM is a PHP FastCGI implementation that is highly customizable compared to other PHP implementations (mod_php and su_php specifically) allowing you to fine tune its performance targets. It is part of the core PHP install since PHP 5.3.
Features include:
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- Adaptive process spawning – spawning processes based on number of busy threads;
- Advanced process management with graceful stop/start;
- Ability to start workers with different uid/gid/chroot/environment and different php.ini;
- Basic statistics.
One downside of PHP-FPM is that it doesn’t scale well if you have tens of websites on your server. If you’re not sure what’s best to use, don’t hesitate contacting us.
7) Floating IP’s
We’ve worked on implementing Floating IP’s for increased redundancy options together with Pacemaker. There’s also direct integration with Digital Ocean’s Floating IP’s based on your Digital Ocean API Key.
8) ClusterCS Agent migration from SSH commands to C#
ClusterCS is a remote management panel which means it connects to your servers remotely through SSH to execute configuration changes, monitoring commands and service repairs. Traditionally, ClusterCS acted as simple remote entity executing commands through the SSH standard shell. Due to various connectivity issues that can occur with with the standard SSH connection the execution of commands can sometimes be interrupted, delayed or lost all together. Complex monitoring and restart scenarios had to be developed to cover such cases.
In order to resolve these issue we have developed an independent agent (ccsRemoteAgent) which gets installed on the managed server to facilitate communication. The ClusterCS management infrastructure continues to establish a SSH connection to the server but this time it’s only to establish a secure communication channel with ccsRemoteAgent. Instead of executing commands directly through the SSH channel, those commands are now being sent to the ccsRemoteAgent which takes care of running the necessary commands in a local environment without any external interference. This stabilizes the protocol, enables rapid detection of SSH failures and commands are not interrupted by re-connection events.
On top of the secured SSH link between ClusterCS management infrastructure and extra encryption layer with public/private keys is enabled on the communication protocol to secure against any local hacks or attack trying to compromise ccsRemoteAgent execution capabilities.
Updates:
We’ve worked together with our customers and based on their feedback and market demand, the pricing has been simplified.
To make things clean from the start, existing customers can keep their preferred pricing. If it’s more advantageous to switch to the new pricing plan, please contact us to make the necessary adjustments.
We are keeping the Free Plan as is, and removing the Professional and Business plans.
The new licensing scheme includes individual purchase of licenses for single server setups or cluster server setups. This allows you to buy single server licences for $7/month or cluster server license for $30/server/month with the ability to scale up/down as needed. Don’t forget that we offer full assistance in setting up clusters so please don’t hesitate to contact us for any support that you may need.
In addition, we’ve added an account wide addon, called Development Environments (Dev Env). This allows access to the Development Environment feature for all the servers and websites under your account. The pricing for the addon is $30 / month.
⦁ Php 7.2 / 7.3 fully supported
You can now use PHP’s latest versions on your server. Remember that you have the ability to have different versions for each domain. Use this in conjunction with the new Development Environments to do A/B testing internally to check performance differences or any bugs that might appear due to a version change.
⦁ Improved setup speed due to new RPM based builds
We’ve migrated more packages to use RPM based builds when using our predefined recipes for server setup or when adding custom services to your build while keeping the standard configuration options.
This should help a lot when you’re trying to experiment with various setups on a low RAM VPS or cloud solutions as compiling packages is a resource intensive operation.
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- Composer has been added as a default dependency for PHP;
- UI Improvements;
- PhpMyAdmin updates;
- Improvements Galera & MySQL Cluster;
- PHP extensions/libs – you can now customize PHP extensions;
- Nginx caching;
- Per zone clear cache;
- Custom Nginx configs;
- Nginx purge module for clear cache;
- Add and edit domain web root;
- pcs pacemaker and floating IPs for standard use or with Digital Ocean integration;
- Update setup system to install same software versions sequentially (optimization for php multi-version to avoid issues with slow server or without much ram);
- Added new nginx service file to allow reload;
- Switch nginx and php to reload instead of restart;
- Added domain logging;
- Added opcache and system to parse and deploy php extensions, ordering and variables in ini file;
- Added RPM installers for PHP, Apache, SuPHP, nginx, spawn_fcgi, lighttpd, haproxy, proftpd (For CentOS 7);
- Added wkhtmltox;
- Added imagick PHP module;
- Adapted haproxy, nginx, apache, lighttpd for development environments
- Added: MySQL 5.7, MySQL 8.0;
- Added support for shared extensions for Apache.
Bugfixes:
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- Add Unzip as a default package for any setup;
- session.save_path missing in php.ini;
- Disabled notice errors by default in PHP.ini;
- Editing domain in Generate Let’s Encrypt;
- Display title for Editing User on Databases;
- Improved Editing Firewall Rules UX;
- Error improvements on add new server setup;
- Wrong Title in page Speed and Databases;
- UI fixes;
- Fixed detection for nginx server to include only those for caching when generating clear cache server paths;
- SSH access for user;
- SEO redirects;
- Clear Cache Get Links support;
- Postfix, roundcube for Galera cluster;
- MySQL on systemv OSes;
- Added support for yum operations – auto retry on errors caused by temporary causes.
Coming soon:
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- Support for HTTP2;
- NodeJS / NPM support;
- Direct native integrations with popular infrastructure providers;
- Improve setup system with wizards for single/clustered servers;
- Availability of clustered file systems;
- New and improved set of articles and documentation with contextual support throughout, complemented by our live agents on the new chat system.