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Cloud 66

E-commerce for Startups

The e-commerce sector has been growing for the past few years. It was one of a few winners during the pandemic crises, increasing its global market share to 17% in 2020. The worldwide market is predicted to reach $5.7 trillion in 2022, according to the SmartInsights report. As a result of the pandemic, we noticed an increase in small and local retail businesses moving online. Two out of three small businesses now accept online payments (PayPal Canada).

How to generate (attractive) colors in code?

Not all colors look good. Let me rephrase: not all colors look good on everything. This is even more applicable when it comes to websites. When put next to each other, it is important for colors to look good, have the right contrast and be readable. Thankfully there are ways to generate such colors - attractive, readable and complementary - using code. I started looking into generating attractive and complementary colors when we were working on a feature involving tags.

Adding Search to Rails with MeiliSearch

There are many ways to add search functionality to a Rails application. While many Rails developers choose to use the native search functionality built into popular databases like MySQL and Postgres, others need more flexible or feature rich search functionality. ElasticSearch is probably the most well known option available but it has its own issues. Firstly, it is a resource hungry beast. To run ElasticSearch properly in production, you need a few beefy servers.

Cloud 66 Feature Highlight: Registered Servers

What are Registered Servers? Registered Servers are a simple way to create a pool of servers on private and public cloud that can be used on any stack and configuration. Applications can be deployed across a hybrid of cloud and registered servers, in this way you could have a dedicated server for your database and burst cloud servers for your front end.

Ubuntu 20.04 Now Supported!

Announcing support for Ubuntu 20.04 on all Cloud 66 products (including registered servers). From this point onward, brand new applications will have Ubuntu 20.04 installed. We will continue to install Ubuntu 18.04 when scaling up servers in an existing application. Don't forget, you can control your target Ubuntu version through your manifest! It has been a while in the building and testing (and dependency pruning), but we are now very pleased to make it public.

Announcing Cloud 66 Prepress

Today we are releasing a completely new product: Cloud 66 Prepress. Prepress is a DevOps product for pre-rendered web applications - particularly those built around Jamstack architecture. We announced Cloud 66 for Rails in 2013. Our Rails product helps developers deploy Rails applications to any cloud with a Heroku-like experience. Today, tens of thousands of developers worldwide use our products to deploy their applications to any cloud.