Changelog

Follow new updates and improvements to LocalOps.

October 16th, 2024

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/connecting-cloud/aws

September 3rd, 2024

Users can now Sign up or Sign In to LocalOps with 1-click, using a Github or Google account. Checkout https://console.localops.co/

August 28th, 2024

When you create a new App 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 ✌ī¸.

August 13th, 2024

If you want to inspect your app 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 App environment page to find out more 😎.

Run this command in your Terminal to install LocalOps CLI in your Mac:

bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://cli.localops.co/install.sh)"

Learn more at https://docs.localops.co/category/cli

August 5th, 2024

We ship every Tuesday. Just so that you know, if you are reading this post for the first time. Checkout our past releases here 🚀.

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 App Environments (What is App 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 App 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 App 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 App 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.

July 29th, 2024

This release is BIG if you are spinning up cloud resources dynamically from your application. Read on!

App environments run in a cloud account (say AWS) that belongs to you or your customer. For each app 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.

July 19th, 2024

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:

  1. NodeJS - https://github.com/localopsco/node-todo-example

  2. Python/Django - https://github.com/localopsco/django-todo-example

  3. 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/bring-your-app/single-page-apps/angular

Ember: https://docs.localops.co/bring-your-app/single-page-apps/ember

VueJS: https://docs.localops.co/bring-your-app/single-page-apps/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 App environments across any cloud.

Sign up for an account at LocalOps for free, to create production ready app 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.

July 8th, 2024

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

  • App 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.

đŸ¤Ŗ 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.

July 1st, 2024

You can now invite QA team into your LocalOps account to spin up Sandbox app environments in your cloud account.

QA can create sandbox app 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 app environments. If a cloud connection is marked for Sandbox, they can be used to create Sandbox environments only.

Day to day scenes:

There is a nice split and separation of concerns between Operations, Developers and QA here.

Operations can dedicate and configure one or more AWS accounts as cloud connections for the team to create Sandbox environments.

Developers can create apps and releases.

QAs (and Devs) can spin up sandbox environments of the apps/releases created by Devs and ON the AWS/GCP/Azure cloud account that Ops created for the purpose.

During Private SaaS deliveries, QA can spin up a sandbox environment in your internally managed AWS account (say), test all new functionality and fixes before a release is applied to all account specific production environments across AWS/Azure/GCP.

During Public SaaS deliveries, QA can do the same and make way for production releases to the main production public SaaS environment running in your AWS/Azure/GCP account.

LocalOps lets you connect any cloud account and manage Sandbox app environments & Production app enivronments - public saas or private saas deployments as homogenous app environments!

Checkout more about QA + Sandbox environments here - https://localops.co/usecases/ephemeral-qa-environments

Get Started:

We offer first 100 hours for free every single month on 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.

If you are curious and want more assistance to get started, please book a free 30-min demo from our website - localops.co.

What is coming next?

Now that you can add multiple members in multiple roles within your LocalOps account, it makes sense to record and see who did what within your account. We are shipping Audit Logs for this purpose. Stay tuned for our next tuesday's release.

If you haven't subscribed to this blog already, you can do so by clicking on the bottom right "Subscribe" button and receive email updates when we post next week.

See you next Tuesday. Happy Shipping! 🚀

June 24th, 2024

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 App 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 App 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 App environment automatically.

This release is the first in this series, starting with accepting minimum and maximum number of servers to spin up for any app 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 App 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 App 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/core-concepts/connections/aws-cloud-credentials.

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 App 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 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.