Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

New York City based startup NS1 got its start providing organizations with managed DNS services to help accelerate application delivery and reliability. With its new NetBox Cloud service that is being announced in preview today, NS1 is expanding its services into a new area beyond DNS. 

It can often be a challenging task for a network administrator in an enterprise to understand where all the networking infrastructure is and how it’s all supposed to be connected.  That’s a job for an emerging class of enterprise technology known as Infrastructure Resource Management (IRM) that NS1 is now jumping into. TechCrunch profiled NS1 in a wide-ranging EC-1 series last month. The company provides DNS as a service, for some of the biggest sites on the internet. DNS, or domain name system is about connecting IP addresses to domain names and NS1 has technology that helps organizations to intelligently optimize application traffic delivery. 

With its new NetBox Cloud service, NS1 is providing a managed service for NetBox which is a popular open source IRM tool that was initially built by developer Jeremy Stretch, while he was working at cloud provider DigitalOcean. Stretch joined NS1 as a distinguished engineer in April of this year, with NS1 now supporting the open source project.

Stretch recounted that at one point during his tenure at DigitalOcean he was using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to track IP address management. Using a spreadsheet to track IP addresses doesn’t scale, so Stretch coded the initial version of NetBox in 2015 to address that need. Over the last several years, NetBox has expanded with additional capabilities that will now also help users of NS1’s NetBox Cloud service.

Stretch explained that Netbox’s role is primarily in modelling network infrastructure in an approach that provides what he referred to as a “source of truth” for network infrastructure. The basic idea is to enable organizations to model their desired state of their networks and then from that point they can draw in monitoring to verify that the operational state is the same as the desired state. 

“So the idea of this source of truth is that it is the actual documented authoritative record of what is supposed to be configured on the network,” Stretch said.

NetBox has continued to grow over the years as a popular open source tool, but it hasn’t been particularly accessible to enterprises that required commercial support to get started, or that wanted a managed service. The goal with the new service is to make it easier for organizations of any size to get started with NetBox to better manage their networks.

NS1 co-founder and CEO Kris Beevers told TechCrunch that while Stretch has done a solid job of building the NetBox open source community, there hasn’t been a commercial service for NetBox. Beevers said that while NetBox has had broad adoption as an open source effort, in his view there are a lot of enterprises that will want commercial support and a managed service.

One key theme that Beevers reiterated time and again in the Extra Crunch EC-1 series is that NS1 is very experimental as a business, and that same theme holds true for NetBox. The primary objective for the initial beta release of the NetBox Cloud is all about figuring out exactly who is trying to adopt the technology and learning what challenges commercial users will face. Fundamentally, Beevers said that NS1 will be actively iterating on NetBox Cloud to make sure it addresses the things that enterprises care about.

“From the NS1 point of view, this is just such a compelling open source product and community and we want to drive barriers to adoption as low as we possibly can,” Beevers said.

NS1 was founded in 2013 and has raised $118.4 million in funding, including a $40 million Series D which the company closed in July 2020.

DigitalOcean has emailed customers warning of a data breach involving customers’ billing data, TechCrunch has learned.

The cloud infrastructure giant told customers in an email on Wednesday, obtained by TechCrunch, that it has “confirmed an unauthorized exposure of details associated with the billing profile on your DigitalOcean account.” The company said the person “gained access to some of your billing account details through a flaw that has been fixed” over a two-week window between April 9 and April 22.

The email said customer billing names and addresses were accessed, as well as the last four digits of the payment card, its expiry date and the name of the card-issuing bank. The company said that customers’ DigitalOcean accounts were “not accessed,” and passwords and account tokens were “not involved” in this breach.

“To be extra careful, we have implemented additional security monitoring on your account. We are expanding our security measures to reduce the likelihood of this kind of flaw occuring [sic] in the future,” the email said.

DigitalOcean said it fixed the flaw and notified data protection authorities, but it’s not clear what the apparent flaw was that put customer billing information at risk.

In a statement, DigitalOcean’s security chief Tyler Healy said 1% of billing profiles were affected by the breach, but declined to address our specific questions, including how the vulnerability was discovered and which authorities have been informed.

Companies with customers in Europe are subject to GDPR and can face fines of up to 4% of their global annual revenue.

Last year, the cloud company raised $100 million in new debt, followed by another $50 million round, months after laying off dozens of staff amid concerns about the company’s financial health. In March, the company went public, raising about $775 million in its initial public offering. 

This morning DigitalOcean, a provider of cloud computing services to SMBs, filed to go public. The company intends to list on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker symbol “DOCN.”

DigitalOcean’s offering comes amidst a hot streak for tech IPOs, and valuations that are stretched by historical norms. The cloud hosting company was joined by Coinbase in filing its numbers publicly today.

However, unlike the cryptocurrency exchange, DigitalOcean intends to raise capital through its offering. Its S-1 filing lists a $100 million placeholder number, a figure that will update when the company announces an IPO price range target.

This morning let’s explore the company’s financials briefly, and then ask ourselves what its results can tell us about the cloud market as a whole.

DigitalOcean’s financial results

TechCrunch has covered DigitalOcean with some frequency in recent years, including its early-2020 layoffs, its early-2020 $100 million debt raise and its $50 million investment from May of the same year that prior investors Access Industries and Andreessen Horowitz participated in.

From those pieces we knew that the company had reportedly reached $200 million in revenue during 2018, $250 million in 2019 and that DigitalOcean had expected to reach an annualized run rate of $300 million in 2020.

Those numbers held up well. Per its S-1 filing, DigitalOcean generated $203.1 million in 2018 revenue, $254.8 million in 2019 and $318.4 million in 2020. The company closed 2020 out with a self-calculated $357 million in annual run rate.

During its recent years of growth, DigitalOcean has managed to lose modestly increasing amounts of money, calculated using generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), and non-GAAP profit (adjusted EBITDA) in rising quantities. Observe the rising disconnect:

After appointing a new CEO and CFO last summer, cloud infrastructure provider DigitalOcean is embarking on a wider reorganisation: the startup has announced a round of layoffs, with potentially between 30 and 50 people affected.

DigitalOcean has confirmed the news with the following statement:

“DigitalOcean recently announced a restructuring to better align its teams to its go-forward growth strategy. As part of this restructuring, some roles were, unfortunately, eliminated. DigitalOcean continues to be a high-growth business with $275M in [annual recurring revenues] and more than 500,000 customers globally. Under this new organizational structure, we are positioned to accelerate profitable growth by continuing to serve developers and entrepreneurs around the world.”

Before the confirmation was sent to us this morning, a number of footprints began to emerge last night, when the layoffs first hit, with people on Twitter talking about it, some announcing that they are looking for new opportunities and some offering help to those impacted. Inbound tips that we received estimate the cuts at between 30 and 50 people. With around 500 employees (an estimate on PitchBook), that would work out to up to 10% of staff affected.

It’s not clear what is going on here — we’ll update as and when we hear more — but when Yancey Spruill and Bill Sorenson were respectively appointed CEO and CFO in July 2019 (Spruill replacing someone who was only in the role for a year), the incoming CEO put out a short statement that, in hindsight, hinted at a refocus of the business in the near future:

“My aspiration is for us to continue to provide everything you love about DO now, but to also enhance our offerings in a way that is meaningful, strategic and most helpful for you over time.”

The company provides a range of cloud infrastructure services to developers, including scalable compute services (“Droplets” in DigitalOcean terminology), managed Kubernetes clusters, object storage, managed database services, Cloud Firewalls, Load Balancers and more, with 12 data centers globally. It says it works with more than 1 million developers across 195 countries. It has also been expanding the services that it offers to developers, including more enhancements in its managed database services, and a free hosting option for continuous code testing in partnership with GitLab.

All the same, as my colleague Frederic pointed out when DigitalOcean appointed its latest CEO, while developers have generally been happy with the company, it isn’t as hyped as it once was, and is a smallish player nowadays.

And in an area of business where economies of scale are essential for making good margins on a business, it competes against some of the biggest leviathans in tech: Google (and its Google Cloud Platform), Amazon (which as AWS) and Microsoft (with Azure). That could mean that DigitalOcean is either trimming down as it talks to investors for a new round; or to better conserve cash as it sizes up how best to compete against these bigger, deep-pocketed players; or perhaps to start thinking about another kind of exit.

In that context, it’s notable that the company not only appointed a new CFO last summer, but also a CEO with prior CFO experience. It’s been a while since DigitalOcean has raised capital. According to PitchBook data, DigitalOcean last raised money in 2017, an undisclosed amount from Mighty Capital, Glean Capital, Viaduct Ventures, Black River Ventures, Hanaco Venture Capital, Torch Capital and EG Capital Advisors. Before that, it took out $130 million in debt, in 2016. Altogether it has raised $198 million, and its last valuation was from a round in 2015, $683 million.

It’s been an active week for layoffs among tech startups. Mozilla laid off 70 employees this week; and the weed delivery platform Eaze is also gearing up for more cuts amid an emergency push for funding.

We’ll update this post as we learn more. Best wishes to those affected by the news.

It’s very easy to install Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) on DigitalOcean. If you’ve never used DigitalOcean before, you will find that it is user-friendly and not very expensive. For $5/month you can easily host your PMM on it, letting you monitor your simple infrastructure or try out PMM before implementing it to monitor your production environments.

Let’s prepare the DigitalOcean instance

Log in to DigitalOcean (DO) control panel and click “Create Droplet.”

Thanks to DO you can skip the boring OS setup and save time by using the Docker “One click app” in DO and the Docker image from PMM.

Note: After clicking on “Docker…” choose an instance size that accommodates your budget – PMM can run on as little as the 1GB 1vCPU instance!

Note: Scroll again!

Next step – select a nearby region

Since the next Percona Live Europe, 2018 will be in Frankfurt (https://www.percona.com/blog/2018/04/05/percona-live-europe-2018-save-the-date/ ) for me the location choice is obvious.

The final step in this section is ‘Set Hostname’

I recommend you add ‘pmm-server-‘ at the beginning so that you can easily find it in your control panel. The name in my case is ‘pmm-server-docker-s-1vcpu-1gb-fra1-01’ and I’ll use it later in this tutorial.

Click “Create” and wait a while.You can follow the process on the dashboard:

When the Droplet is created, you’ll get an email with your login details.

The next step is ‘Set up PMM into the Droplet’

SSH to the server, change the password, and let’s prepare to install the PMM server.

==================
random@random-vb:~$ ssh root@X.X.X.X
...
"ufw" has been enabled. All ports except 22 (SSH), 80 (http) and 443 (https)
have been blocked by default.
...
Changing password for root.
(current) UNIX password:
Enter new UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
root@pmm-server-docker-s-1vcpu-1gb-fra1-01:~#
====================

Note the output for the first login. You are getting Ubuntu 16.04 with pre-installed Docker.

The instructions for installing PMM are very simple. You can read them at https://www.percona.com/doc/percona-monitoring-and-management/deploy/server/docker.html

1) Pull the latest version from Docker Hub:

docker pull percona/pmm-server:latest

Wait for some time (this depends on your internet connection)

2) Create a container for persistent PMM data

docker create
-v /opt/prometheus/data
-v /opt/consul-data
-v /var/lib/mysql
-v /var/lib/grafana
--name pmm-data
percona/pmm-server:latest /bin/true

3) Create and launch PMM Server in one command

docker run -d
-p 80:80
--volumes-from pmm-data
--name pmm-server
--restart always
percona/pmm-server:latest

Just to confirm that your containers are available, go ahead and run “docker ps.” You’ll see something like this:

root@pmm-server-docker-s-1vcpu-1gb-fra1-01:~# docker ps
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES
5513858041f7 percona/pmm-server:latest "/opt/entrypoint.sh" 2 minutes ago Up 2 minutes 0.0.0.0:80->80/tcp, 443/tcp pmm-server

That’s all! Congratulations! Your PMM server is running.

If you open the IP of your server in the browser, you’ll see something like this:

There you can see that PMM has already started monitoring itself.

Now you need to install PMM client on your database server and configure it, instructions for this are at https://www.percona.com/doc/percona-monitoring-and-management/deploy/client/index.html

Please note, if you also use DO for the database server by external IP, you’ll probably face “the firewall problem.” In this case, you need to open ports using the “ufw” tool. (See the welcome message from Digital Ocean). For testing purposes, you can use

ufw allow 42000:42999/tcp

To open only pmm-client related ports, follow https://www.percona.com/doc/percona-monitoring-and-management/glossary.terminology.html#term-ports  To run ufw, you need to use the terminal, and you can find more information about ufw at https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/ufw-essentials-common-firewall-rules-and-commands  Once you have opened up the ports, PMM should now work correctly for this setup.

Final recommendation: Depending on your load you may need to monitor your System Overview dashboard which you’ll find at http://X.X.X.X/graph/somesymbols/system-overview

If you are out of space, upgrade your DO Droplet.

The post Deploying PMM on DigitalOcean appeared first on Percona Database Performance Blog.

Over the past few years, the old language of “customer support” has been supplanted by the new language of “customer success.” In the old model, companies would essentially disappear following the conclusion of a sale, merely handling customer problems when they arose. Now, companies are actively reaching out to customers, engaging them with education and training and monitoring them with analytics to ensure they have the best time with the product as possible.

What’s changing is the nature of product and services today: subscription. Customers no longer just make a single buying decision about a product, but instead must actively commit to using the product, or else they churn.

New York-based Catalyst, founded by brothers Edward and Kevin Chiu, wants to rebuild customer success from the ground up with an integrated software platform. They have received some capital success of their own, securing $2.4 million in venture capital from Phil Black of True Ventures with participation from Ludlow Ventures and Compound.

New York has had something of an increase in founder mafias, as TechCrunch reported this weekend. Catalyst is no exception to this trend, with the Chiu brothers both working at DigitalOcean, one of New York’s many high-flying enterprise startups. Edward Chiu was director of customer success at the company for a number of years, but had a unique background in sales and also in coding before starting.

Kevin Chiu was head of inside sales at DigitalOcean . “I brought my brother on to do sales at DigitalOcean,” Edward Chiu explains. “We always knew that we wanted to start a company together, but wanted to see if we would kill each other.” The two worked together, and lo and behold, they didn’t kill each other.

Edward Chiu wanted to match the product experience of using DigitalOcean with the experience of using its internal customer success tools. Nothing on the market fit. “Given that DigitalOcean was a very technical product,” Chiu explained, “we decided to build our own tool.” Chiu thought of customer success at DigitalOcean as its own product, and his team built up the platform to improve its functionality and scalability. “We just used the tool and we loved it,” he said, so we “started to show this tool to a bunch of other customer success leaders I am connected with.”

Other customer success leaders said they wanted the platform, and “after the 20th person told me that,” he and his brother spun out of DigitalOcean to go on their own. Unlike enterprise startups in New York a couple of years ago that often struggled to find any investors, Catalyst found cash quickly. “Two weeks in we had more offers than we knew what to do with,” Chiu explained. The two said they had originally targeted a fundraise of $750,000, but ended up at $2.4 million.

Catalyst is a platform that integrates between a number of other major SaaS services such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Mixpanel and others to create a unified dashboard for data around customer success. From there, customer success managers have a set of automated tools to handle engagement, such as customer segmentation and email campaigns.

A major challenge in the customer success world is that these managers often don’t have the skills required to do advanced data analytics, so they often rely on their friends in engineering to run scripts or perform database lookups. The hope is that Catalyst’s feature set is powerful enough that these sorts of ad hoc tasks become a thing of the past. “Because we aggregate all this data, you can run queries,” Chiu explains.

Chiu says that Catalyst doesn’t just want to be a software platform, but rather a movement that pushes every company to think about how they can make their customers successful. “There are so many companies that are starting to understand that it is not something that you do once you raise a Series A, but something you do from day one,” Chiu said. “If you take care of your very first customer, they will constantly promote you and constantly promote your business.”

The company is based in Flatiron, and has eight employees.