2024
Updates and improvements of year 2024
Quick search in Developer docs
Quick search in Developer docs
Checkout the new search functionality in LocalOps Developer docs.
You click on search bar in the top right corner or press CMD+K to then search for any term and it will take you to the correct topic page instantly. It will even remember your past searches if you search within the same browser next time.
Quick search in Developer docs
Checkout the new search functionality in LocalOps Developer docs.
You click on search bar in the top right corner or press CMD+K to then search for any term and it will take you to the correct topic page instantly. It will even remember your past searches if you search within the same browser next time.
See https://docs.localops.co now.
Pass Encrypted Secrets
Pass API keys, certificates, auth token and other confidential information to your environment as secrets from within Vars tab. All secrets are encrypted and stored in the destination/target cloud account and later get passed inside the Kubernetes cluster as encrypted secrets.
Pass up to 100 key value pairs as secrets. Learn more at https://localops.co/blog/manage-application-secrets.
Set Environment vars
Developers can now set environment variables in the brand new Yaml editor:
Lookout for Edit helm values button.
Documentation - https://docs.localops.co/bring-your-helm-charts/env-vars
Connect to AWS without IAM keys
We no longer accept IAM access keys to connect to AWS accounts.
We have shipped a new secure 1-click setup process to connect to AWS accounts using IAM roles and OIDC protocol. This ensures that all access is done using short term keys created and destroyed by AWS.
AWS accounts can be connected using 1-click from Connections tab. Learn more at https://docs.localops.co/accounts/aws
One click signup
Users can now Sign up or Sign In to LocalOps with 1-click, using a Github or Google account. Checkout https://console.localops.co/
Friday warnings
When you create a new environment or make a new Deployment on an existing environment, you will get a warning like this:
And we are now fully integrated with Stripe to collect recurring payments. Go ahead and subscribe from your Billing section inside Account settings ✌️.
Introducing LocalOps CLI v1
If you want to inspect your environment & its backing kubernetes cluster, say to check if your application’s pods are running healthy, use Localops CLI to do it.
Just install it in your local dev machine and use its update-kubeconfig sub-command to set correct kubernetes context of your local kubectl system. Then, you can run any kubectl command to inspect objects running in the specific app environment’s kubernetes cluster.
Checkout the new Shell tab in environment page to find out more 😎.
Run this command in your Terminal to install LocalOps CLI in your Mac:
Learn more at https://docs.localops.co/cli
We ship every Tuesday 🚀. Just so that you know
At LocalOps, we are super serious about Data Privacy. We have made it our mission to build tools for the Internet 🌐 to support Private App deployments / Private SaaS deployments.
These days, we have begun reaching out to our signups to either check if they need assistance in their first steps with LocalOps or send out product updates from time to time. So, we are asking for user’s explicit consent during our Signup process to reach out to them in these ways.
In addition, we fixed a bunch of stuff that kept annoying us more than ever. Starting with Email Notifications.
All Environments (What is an Environment?) get a free ssl cert and a subdomain on *.localops.run domain by default. They become instantly accessible and publicly shareable on the internet once they are up. It takes roughly 18-20mins to provision an Environment on the cloud, say AWS today. So we inform users via email after their environment is fully provisioned & ready to accept requests. Sometimes, this email went out before the App got fully deployed within the environment and this was quite misleading! We finally fixed this bug 🐛 this week.
Next up - we are planning to introduce support for AWS RDS, AWS Elastic Cache and other managed database services on AWS. Users could declare them as their dependencies and have them created in each environment they create for their App. We already support Amazon S3 and we have laid foundations to support even more services in future. Not just in AWS but in Google Cloud and Azure as well.
But, a major blocker here was that we couldn’t enable Multi-AZ (Availability Zone) fallback for a DB cluster, say in RDS, unless we had 3 AWS private subnets in 3 unique AZs available in each environment. We improved our implementation to spin up 3 subnets instead of 2 subnets this week. LocalOps would connect to the target cloud account, query for available subnets and available AZs in that account, picks 3 AZs programmatically and spin up subnets in each of those AZs. 😎 Isn’t this cool?
There is a bunch of other new things we are building to make Private SaaS deployments easy.
Get Started with LocalOps here by signing up for a free trial. And start deploying your app on any cloud for any customer within minutes. Every account gets 100 free hours on sandbox environment every single month.
Or schedule a demo if you want us to get you started.
Spinning up cloud resources dynamically?
This release is BIG if you are spinning up cloud resources dynamically from your application. Read on!
Environments run in a cloud account (say AWS) that belongs to you or your customer. For each environment you spin up using LocalOps, a dedicated network is provisioned in a specific region within the connected cloud account. And safe/useful defaults are set during the process.
This information about the dedicated network, the cloud region, the defaults and everything else is useful for the application in many scenarios. For example, to dynamically provision cloud resources such as EBS volumes, EC2 instances at run time from your application.
So we have begun to pass this surrounding context / network / cloud information to your application as additional Helm values. These can be further consumed by your application as Environment variables as appropriate.
We also send other information to your application such as App version. So that you can do update checks, license checks etc., as needed.
Checkout our Developer documentation to learn more.
Other update:
We moved to Cloudflare Turnstile to get users signed up and logged in pretty fast. H-Captcha was relatively more stringent and introduced more friction.
🚀 Get Started with LocalOps now, to automate cloud deployments, especially if you deploy applications on end customers cloud / Private SaaS deployments.
Take a 30-min demo, if you have specific questions 😄
Cheers.
Help is here! One hundred articles out
As we head for our launch in Product Hunt and other communities later this quarter, we wanted to make LocalOps platform self serve and super obvious for developers to get started with.
So our team doubled down on Developer documentation past week. And wrote a ton of example code, documentation, manuals and help articles.
We did count them and we produced ~100 articles across our Help center and Developer documentation.
Checkout our developer documentation here - https://docs.localops.co and help center here - https://help.localops.co.
We didn’t stop there 👆.
We shipped example full stack applications using ReactJS on the Front end and Python / NodeJS / Golang on the backend, to guide developers using one of these stacks to package their application as Helm chart and bring their applications to LocalOps.
Checkout example repositories here:
- NodeJS - https://github.com/localopsco/node-todo-example
- Python/Django - https://github.com/localopsco/django-todo-example
- Golang - https://github.com/localopsco/go-sample-app
If someone is not using ReactJS, there are other examples available as well in our developer docs:
- Angular: https://docs.localops.co/guides/spa/angular
- Ember: https://docs.localops.co/guides/spa/ember
- VueJS: https://docs.localops.co/guides/spa/vue
(Soon) LocalOps GPT:
We may create our official GPT sometime. And publish it on GPT marketplace for our users to add us, ask questions directly within ChatGPT interface 😇.
Stay tuned!
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Get started for FREE on LocalOps: Start deploying your Apps as environments across any cloud.
Sign up for an account at LocalOps for free, to create production ready environments in your cloud or your customer’s cloud: https://console.localops.co/signup. Every account gets 100 hours free on Sandbox environments every month.
If you want a personalised demo, schedule a call with us here.
We consider Documentation as our product too. We want to make it easy for Developers & DevOps teams to find what they need and quickly move on.
We will continue investing a lot of our time to make Developer documentation super rich.
Announcing Multi-Cloud audit log:
Tuesdays are always special for us. We work from 3 different timezones and we come together on a single channel on every Tuesday to make new releases.
Last week, we introduced QA role. Account owners can invite Developers and QAs within LocalOps to spin up App environments in their cloud or customer’s cloud.
🎉 Today, we shipped Audit Log.
Anyone within your LocalOps account can see who created environments in which cloud or who made deployments. This will be super useful to ensure visibility and transparency within your team.
With this release, LocalOps becomes a central audit log of who initiated what across ALL your/customer cloud accounts (AWS/GCP/Azure) and across ALL cloud regions.
How does it work?
Everyone can see all actions done within the account, under “Audit log” tab.
We record & show name of the user who triggered the action and the location from which they did this action.
All the following actions get recorded in the Audit log.
- App creation and deletion
- Release creation and deletion
- Environment creation & deletion
- App Deployments
- Sign in and sign out
And of course you can filter these actions by User, App or Environments.
No matter which cloud your environment is running in, all actions performed within your LocalOps account are recorded and shown under your Audit log screen.
🤣 Try doing the same via AWS CloudTrail in your/other AWS accounts and you will find day & night difference in Day-1 configuration and Day-N utility. Talk about doing this across multiple AWS, Google or Azure accounts you manage and you would find how quickly things get impractical.
Get started with LocalOps today:
Want to make SaaS or Private SaaS deployments to your cloud or customer cloud from a single dashboard? Sign up now for a 30-day free trial.
Or book a free 30-min demo anytime and we will personally get you started with making multi-cloud deployments across all your customers.
👋 See you next Tuesday.
You can now invite QA team into your LocalOps account to spin up Sandbox environments in your cloud account.
QA can create sandbox environments in your AWS/GCP/Azure account, test all new functionality your Developers shipped and give approval to proceed with actual production rollouts.
Sandbox environments are useful if you want to bring up an isolated & temporary cloud infrastructure to test out application functionality in isolation. They also come handy when you want to load test applications in isolation without interfering with anything else in the team.
QAs can spin up or tear down any number of Sandbox environments in any cloud account you set them up with. You can invite any number of QA users within your account and let them work in isolation, without stepping on each other, without waiting on developers to prepare their test environment and ultimately be super productive!
FREE: Every LocalOps account gets first 100 hours for free, every single month for Sandbox environments. Sign up for a free 30-day trial and manage all cloud deployments across AWS/GCP/Azure in a single place - your LocalOps account.
Operations team can setup Cloud connections (say your AWS account) that are dedicated for such environments. If a cloud connection is marked for Sandbox, they can be used to create Sandbox environments only.
We want to make it easier for you (developers) to not just deploy applications on “any cloud” (your cloud or your customer cloud / Private SaaS) but also want to let you handle customers of “any size”. It could be a medium size business in Europe with 20 agents or a financial enterprise with 200 agents.
So we announced capabilities last week to let developers configure N number of servers to get created (via Environment Template) while spinning up environments on day 1. And that could be sufficient for many customers with predictable workloads. It would get configured based on information one might have on day 1 on how big that deployment could end up be.
But, come on! It’s 2024. We are not living in SliceHost age. We are miles into the cloud era now and we want to be able to expand and shrink the servers based on load.
🎉 Enter auto-scaling!
We have begun to setup auto-scaling by default (yup - by default!) in all environments. No one has to learn a thing about how do this all in a given target cloud - AWS, Azure or Google cloud. We make it happen behind the scenes in every environment automatically.
This release is the first in this series, starting with accepting minimum and maximum number of servers to spin up for any environment, via environment templates.
Learn more about Environment templates: https://blog.localops.co/whats-new-on-june-18/
We are marching into a place where your environments will expand when there is more load. And will shrink when the load is low, achieving the true vision of “the cloud”, resulting in enormous savings on cloud bills for you / your customer (Private SaaS deployments). Developers can define these resource requirements in their Helm chart and configure the min and max number of servers to create for each environment in LocalOps. LocalOps would configure Kubernetes cluster (which is powering the environment) to honour those rules, seamlessly. Users don’t need to learn much DevOps jargon to configure it all.
Stay tuned, we are working hard on a set of follow up releases to fully realise this vision. All while asking very little from developers to learn or configure.
Updates to LocalOps Documentation:
We also improved our documentation in bunch of different ways. Starting with instructions on getting cloud credentials to connect to LocalOps. Checkout https://docs.localops.co/accounts/aws.
We consider Documentation as our product too. You will see more updates to documentation to make things extra clear for everyone to use LocalOps.
Speaking about documentation, we have placed links to documentation throughout your account. So it will be super easy to learn about a concept and configure environments in a jiffy. And it will always be handy in bottom right corner in your account:
Announcing our changelog:
You can read about weekly releases if you visit this blog at https://blog.localops.co and click on “Changelog”. You can also access our Changelog also the bottom right help menu in your account.
Please subscribe to our blog here (see bottom right) and you will receive email updates whenever we publish new posts on our releases and more.
We did a lot of tiny improvements within your account that can make it extra clear for you to signup and deploy applications quickly on your customer cloud or your cloud. Sign up now to take a free 30 day trial.
Take a 30-min demo with us, in case you build SaaS products and want to deploy applications in your customer cloud or provide dedicated infrastructure to specific customer accounts within your cloud, or want to set up production environment in AWS, say for first time.
See you next Tuesday 👋.
🎉 We shipped two new capabilities this time!
First, we made it easy for you to create identical environments with identical infra configurations, using Environment Templates.
What are Environment Templates?
You get to define commonly used compute, network, storage configurations of your environments as “Environment Templates”. Whenever you create a new environment, you get to specify the template name to use, to boot up the environment.
You can define a template for your internal QA environments, cloud-prem deliveries, single tenant deliveries or even SaaS production environments.
For each app, you can go on to define ideal size configuration of the underlying worker nodes / virtual servers to start their environments in. So that no one gets to under-provision or over-provision Cloud-prem/SaaS/QA environments by mistake.
Environment templates are offered in all accounts without limits. Sign up now to give LocalOps a spin
Two Global Resource Tags:
Second, we wanted to help DevOps teams (internal/external on your customers end) to locate cloud resources that are provisioned by LocalOps in their cloud account. And potentially calculate how much they are all adding up to the cloud (AWS, say) bill every month.
So we came up with ✌️ two standard tags and attached them everywhere. You can use services like AWS Resource Explorer or AWS Billing console to filter and see resources by these two tags.
Note: Name and value of these two tags are unique for each environment. Please copy them from environment’s Settings section:
We are having a great time here in building LocalOps. We want to make it super easy and super intuitive for you to spin up environments in any cloud and deploy applications in your cloud or your customer’s cloud (cloud-prem deliveries).
If you want to put LocalOps to use in your organisation for making Cloud-prem deliveries in your customer cloud or for provisioning tearable QA environments in your cloud or anything in between, please book a 30-min demo with us. We will get you started first hand.
Or simply sign up anytime. There is a 30-day free trial and a very generous 100 free hours on Sandbox/QA enivornments after that.
See you next tuesday! 👋
Yup, we kept our weekly release promise.
You can now invite your team members in your LocalOps account to do private cloud deliveries. You can assign them either Administrator, Operations or Developer role.
How can someone think about these roles?
Here is how - Developers can build apps & releases and make them available in your localops account. While Operations team can be customer facing to create environments and make deployments. Administrator is of course the super admin and can delete/create/update everything.
We will soon be releasing another role called “QA” to let them create internal environments as they see fit. More on this next week may be. We have bunch of other cool stuff cooking in the kitchen.
We didn’t want to outsource this to WorkOS or any other similar service. We would like to keep our (password less) authentication tight, small and with us to control it better and faster in future.
Signup now, if you are impressed with any of this any bit. Or take a 30-min demo with us anytime. We will personally show you around LocalOps and how it can help your org make private cloud deliveries.
See you next Tuesday.
We made a release today. Thats new, to start with!
We are making it a habit at LocalOps to ship every Tuesday. There it goes on our Basecamp schedule:
As for today, lets start with some appetizers.
If you signed up for LocalOps and created your brand new “environments”, you will get a email notification when your environment is created and running in a healthy state. It takes around 15-20mins to get each environment up in your aws cloud, so this email will be useful to pull you back in when things are ready.
Side note: all environments get provisioned with a unique URL and a ssl cert by default. Just like you see on a PaaS service, but in your/customer AWS cloud. Encryption at transit is enabled by default everywhere.
Second, when you attempt to create a new environment, you will be greeted with the big question of what to create: Private delivery, Production SaaS or Sandbox/qa environments.
Third, when you signup for LocalOps, you will be welcomed with a nice warm tour guide. It will introduce you to some basic concepts to be productive inside LocalOps. And I guess the tour UI looks pretty pretty for everyone. Let us know how it looks.
If all this is impressing you any bit, lets talk. We will accelerate/streamline your private cloud deliveries like you have never seen before. You can book some time to meet with us on zoom. Here is our calendar link.
We will be pushing more in the next weeks to come.
See you next tuesday!