ECG Robotics FRC Team, Triple Strange #1533, after winning their second district event last season.

When a high school junior in North Carolina was searching for a server to host websites for a competitive robotics program, CenturyLink was happy to provide one.

We first heard from Aidan Hunt, who takes college courses through an early entry program at Guilford College, when he contacted us in late May as a representative of the school’s FIRST® Robotics club, ECG Robotics, which has about 100 members who attend schools in and around Greensboro and Guilford County. FIRST Robotics (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is an international 501(c)3 nonprofit organization created to inspire K-12 students to pursue studies and careers in science and technology.

ECG Robotics has five teams that compete in two levels of “sport of the mind,” in which teams build robots to perform predetermined tasks, and have qualified for the World Championship in Houston, Texas for the past three seasons. Hunt’s team, Triple Strange, won one of eight divisions and every pre-championship event last year.

Along with the technical talent needed to build their robots, a team’s success also hinges on its ability to collect and analyze data from competitions. What FIRST...

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As part of the August 14th disclosure by Intel, three security vulnerabilities have been named:

• CVE-2018-3646 (L1 Terminal Fault - VMM)
• CVE-2018-3620 (L1 Terminal Fault - OS)
• CVE-2018-3615 (L1 Terminal Fault – SGX, SMM)

At this time, there is no indication that these vulnerabilities have impacted us or have been used to attack our customers.

Intel has posted detailed information about these vulnerabilities here.

Briefly, each of these vulnerabilities affects a different aspect of the terminal fault vulnerability.

CenturyLink has taken the necessary steps to mitigate this vulnerability through vendor recommended patches and microcode updates. No further action is necessary.

CenturyLink recommends that customers apply necessary security updates in a timely manner.

For Linux users, a number of tests can be performed to validate your level of protection:

Ubuntu OS Details and Tests

RedHat Details and Tests, including Ansible playbooks to ease testing

Linux Kernel Details and tests

Microsoft also provides details on testing and...

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Providing our customers with the most reliable services on the most competitive technologies requires continuously evaluating and updating our product catalog. Over the past year, we’ve worked diligently to improve CenturyLink Cloud’s standard compute service so we can fulfill more of our customers’ cloud hosting needs, and stay at par with the best of the best in the competitive cloud landscape.

Over the past year, we’ve standardized our storage infrastructure on all-flash platforms so customers can host distributed workloads on a common compute product and maximize performance. Based on the positive feedback we received about these improvements, we realized that customers no longer needed Hyperscale, our specialized all-flash storage cloud compute service.

When we launched Hyperscale in 2014, it was a new approach to enterprise storage. For businesses that needed to store and process massive amounts of data — in industries like banking, oil/gas, and healthcare — Hyperscale was an exciting opportunity to adopt more effective and nimble data collection strategies.

While a corporate data center might support hundreds of physical servers and thousands of virtual machines, Hyperscale could support thousands of physical servers and millions of virtual machines to quickly accommodate increased demands for internet-facing and back-end computing resources. It was a...

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Companies operating in a Hybrid IT environment need to manage both internal and customer-facing applications so they can reduce downtime, save money, increase productivity, and deliver new solutions to market. And most organizations recognize their need to align themselves with partners and consultants to provide expertise and guidance to properly fulfill their digital requirements.

With Cloud Application Manager, CenturyLink offers two support models — Managed Services Anywhere or Platform Advisory Support. These two approaches offer flexibility in engagement and level of expertise so businesses can choose the one that best fits their needs. The question is: Which one is right for your organization?

Platform Advisory Support is an enterprise-grade baseline support package for businesses that need less hands-on expertise. A designated Technical Account Manager is available to provide recommendations around best practices and platform triage, and CenturyLink leads and owns support responsibilities for all services utilized within the platform. That includes lead support responsibility for Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services whether you buy your own cloud, start from scratch, or build upon legacy assets.

Managed Services Anywhere orchestrates the delivery of infrastructure, applications and services across multiple cloud environments. Offering all the benefits of Platform Advisory Support, this is fully-managed service that...

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Predictive monitoring has a range of business applications, from uncovering fraud in credit card transactions to detecting intrusions in a computer network.

With deeper context for fluctuating metrics through predictive monitoring, anomaly detection, and forecasting, identifying aberrant behavior in network traffic patterns can help an IT Security team ward off attempted attacks. Algorithms modeled to forecast expected behavior can give your team the ability to both visualize expected trends and specify when they want to receive alerts about potential issues.

CenturyLink’s Cloud Application Manager takes a best-practice approach to automation that weeds out a greater number of false positives than standard systems. This is where other options that rely on threshold-based alerts for cloud monitoring — especially when alerts occur and there’s really nothing wrong — leave much to be desired.

Infrastructure supporting workloads is supposed to work hard, so threshold-based alerting can define maximum efficiency as a problem. Signals that cross a threshold may not represent an actual problem, while changes that may be problematic may not actually cross the threshold. Likewise, signals that cross a threshold close to an outage scenario may not leave enough time to react to a problem, while adjusting thresholds closer to the norm of the signal...

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Choosing a cloud management platform begins with knowing the business needs it is designed to address. Features can vary by vendor, and needs will vary from one organization to the next.

With the growth and ease-of-access of the cloud, many businesses already consume resources at a fast-paced rate. Having visibility into what is being consumed, as well as how much and by whom, is a critical part of an investment decision-making strategy. Cloud management refers to administrative control over public, private, hybrid and multi-cloud deployments as way to centralize control of various cloud-based infrastructures. So, a cloud management platform is a suite of integrated software tools that a business can use to monitor and control cloud computing resources. Some target niche industries or vertical markets, while others offer a broad toolset. Some are delivered as on-premises applications, while others come as software as a service.

The success, predictability and stability of a hybrid IT environment is directly related to the implementation of policies and oversight that frees up business units to consume services on-demand. This includes ensuring that permissions are allocated appropriately and cloud-consumption services have safeguards to ensure that costs are kept in check.

A fully managed service provider experience enables business...

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CenturyLink Cloud completed the implementation of all available patches on January 13. We are continuing to work with hardware and software vendors on the release of new patches to be tested and applied as they are released. You can follow the progress more closely and subscribe to updates on our status site, status.ctl.io.

Also, please note that while CenturyLink is patching our environment, we want to remind our customers that they are responsible for updating the operating system for their cloud virtual and bare metal servers. We recommend that you check with your operating system vendor(s) and system manufacturer(s) and apply any updates as soon as they are available. Below are many useful resources about the issue.

OS and Hardware vendors

• Microsoft security update • Red Hat security update • SuSe • Ubuntu • Chrome OS • ARM security update • Qualcomm press release • Wind River

System Manufacturers

• Acer • Apple •...

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CenturyLink Cloud completed initial patching 1/8/2018 as anticipated. Customers who fall into the 8% of infrastructure remaining have been contacted with more detailed timelines. However, we are continuing to mitigate potential threats by testing and implementing patches as they are released. You can follow the progress more closely and subscribe to updates on our status site, status.ctl.io.

Lastly, please note that while CenturyLink is patching our environment, we want to remind our customers that they are responsible for updating the operating system of their cloud virtual and bare metal servers. We recommend you check with your operating system vendor(s) and system manufacturer(s), and apply any updates as soon as they are available.

For managed OS customers please reference the Managed OS Patching and Update Process knowledge base article.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact help@ctl.io.

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On Wednesday, January 3rd, 2018, Google publicly disclosed Meltdown and Spectre, two methods for attacking Intel, AMD, and ARM processor vulnerabilities (CVE-2017-5715, CVE-2017-5753, and CVE-2017-5754). CenturyLink Cloud is aware of these vulnerabilities and is actively mitigating potential threats. Fixes are currently being tested, and anticipate that 92% of our environment to be patched by Monday, January 8th, 2018. Customers who fall into the remaining 8% of infrastructure will be contacted directly within 24 hours for patching timelines. An update will be provided when all fixes are in place.

At this time, there is no indication that these vulnerabilities have impacted us or have been used to attack our customers.

Please note that while CenturyLink is patching our environment, we want to remind our customers that they are responsible for updating the operating system of their cloud virtual and bare metal servers. We recommend you check with your operating system vendor(s) and system manufacturer(s), and apply any updates as soon as they are available.

For managed OS customers, please reference the Patching and update process Knowledge Base article.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact help@ctl.io.

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Businesses large and small are leveraging the cloud to run a variety of applications that are critical to their success. Tools for sales and customer management, inventory management, expense tracking, file storage and sharing, websites, and custom applications are just a few of the many cloud-hosted services that keep businesses running. The scalable and global nature of the cloud helps to create affordable and flexible applications in a web hosting solution for most businesses today. Since servers host these applications in the cloud, it only makes sense to load balance the servers in the cloud as well.

Proven Performance

Real-world application performance can be unpredictable. To ensure maximum uptime and reliability, the CenturyLink Platform offers a portfolio of cloud load balancers to meet the unique requirements of your apps. Less complex applications can deploy shared load balancers, while more involved apps can use dedicated load balancers that support advanced OSI Model Layer 4 - Transport and Layer 7 - Application rules. SSL offloading is also available, from 100 Mbps to 500 Mbps.

Cloud Load Balancing from CenturyLink uses a multi-tenant, scalable, and programmable infrastructure presented to the customer as a service. The Dedicated Load Balancer uses Citrix® NetScaler®, the industry’s leading web application...

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CenturyLink Cloud® is open for business Down Under.

The new Sydney location features our portfolio of compute, storage, and networking products, fully self-service, elastic, and on-demand.

Now, businesses operating or based in Australia can now turn to a single, trusted provider for public and private Cloud infrastructure, managed services, colocation, networking and support for advanced Hybrid IT scenarios. The Sydney site is our 14th public cloud node, and is federated with our other locations in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and Singapore.

CenturyLink Cloud’s infrastructure and platform offers customers an enterprise-ready path to leveraging cloud services to meet their business and IT requirements. Users can deploy a wide range of applications on our infrastructure – lift-and-shift migrations, traditional three-tier apps, and new cloud native patterns.

Key CenturyLink Differentiators

So what's different about CenturyLink's services? What's unique for the Australian market?

• CenturyLink Public Cloud offers built-in cloud management, automation and orchestration capabilities to help customers enable business agility with self-service. Bundled billing and governance features reduce runaway spending or bill shock.

• Customers can provision highly-configurable virtual servers instantly. These can then be connected to our full portfolio of Hybrid IT services– Colocation, Managed Hosting and Network, to deliver real-world applications running in across different islands of

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The new year often brings about a time of reflection, coupled with an anticipation of what’s to come. Along those lines, we wanted to share with you some key highlights of 2015 and things to look forward to in 2016. 2015 was a busy year at CenturyLink Cloud, as we expanded our global presence, completed hundreds of product and feature launches on a 15-day cadence, and were recognized by industry experts as a leading cloud service provider.

Leading Industry Analyst Firms Recognize CenturyLink's 2015 Cloud Achievements

• Frost & Sullivan honors CenturyLink Cloud with Company of the Year Award for the North American Cloud Industry and also published a report on how CenturyLink is Setting the Standard for the Next Generation of Cloud Services.

• Gartner granted us “Visionary” status in their annual Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service. (1)

• Gartner also named us a “Leader” in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting, Asia Pacific, 2015. (2)

Platform Highlights of 2015

• One of the top concerns of our customers when it comes to cloud is security. In an effort to outline key security strategies we compiled the CenturyLink Cloud Security Overview Guide (and an eBook, if you’d like the 5 Best Practices cliff notes version). Take our “Weakest

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In this space, we have discussed the benefits of running virtual servers and bare metal with CenturyLink Cloud. The pitch: create and scale your apps via self-service, across a variety of infrastructure options, within the same UI and API framework.

These services empower developers to build new apps faster than ever before. This is the sea change occurring in our industry.

Under the backdrop of this change, however, one constant has emerged. Yes, companies want infrastructure services that are elastic and highly automated.

But they want to administer and manage cloud deployments like incumbent systems.

"The More Things Change..."

Customers tell us that governance, control, transparency, billing, and reporting are still important. These priorities persist in the cloud era. To IT Ops teams, these administrative features complement the on-demand, pay-as-you-go goodness that fuels rapid app development.

To this end, we've launched several new features to help customers realize the benefits of cloud computing...while helping them adhere to their current operational practices and policies.

Below are a few examples.

Service Catalog

IT Ops Perspective: "Things in my org change quickly, and I want to retain control over how new services are exposed to employees. Ticket volumes go up when unfamiliar things are available to the masses."

Feature: Service Catalog. Selected capabilities...

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Executives, IT pros, and developers are all looking for ways to inject more automation into their business processes. Public cloud services are a key enabler. But there are degrees of automation.

To take this notion further, the Gartner Mode 1 / Mode 2 perspective on enterprise IT is a helpful frame of reference. Let’s start with Mode 2 first:

• Mode 2 workloads – the cloud-native apps – are everyone’s favorite son. These “transform the business” projects are API-driven, and built to scale on low cost, elastic compute. Automation is central to application architecture and design - so much so that very small teams of engineers can create amazing apps that “go viral” worldwide. “Robots” do all the undifferentiated heavy lifting.

• Mode 1 workloads – the existing “core” apps that run the business today – have a different slant on automation. These programs were largely designed for traditional infrastructure or basic virtualization, and as such, are ill suited for cloud scale. But the opportunity for automation exists in the form of day-to-day maintenance and optimization. Human experts are needed to keep these apps running - often in the form of outsourced managed services - since significant internal investment can’t be justified.

Our June release has...

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Regular readers of our release notes know we now detail enhancements across a broad range of services, beyond what’s included in our flagship public cloud services.

This shift has a practical benefit to customers, since the vast majority of what we build is available via self-service and on-demand. Online documentation is crucial to enabling our customers with these new capabilities.

Here are a few highlights of our May release, grouped by product “theme” for context.

New Services for Developers

Most businesses that have thrived the past decade have one thing in common – great software. (Cue the "software is eating the world" narrative.)

If you’re operating in the retail, consumer goods, or transportation sector, how do you consistently build and deliver great software to users? You use the cloud, and you use new, innovative services that make life easier for developers. Two such examples are front-and-center in the May release:

• Orchestrate.io – API-driven database-as-a-service, recently acquired by CenturyLink. The service is now accessible in four CenturyLink Cloud nodes, and can be integrated in with other cloud deployments.

Open Source

The embrace of open-source within the enterprise is a popular topic here. The team at CenturyLink Labs provides regular contributions as seen with Panamax… and now ImageLayers.io: an open-source...

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Effective immediately, a new ticket prioritization process is in place for incidents submitted to CenturyLink Cloud’s support team.

What is changing?

Our prioritization structure has simplified, to better reflect the type of incidents we receive from customers. In addition, the new structure reflects the different support tiers introduced several months ago.

What does this change mean for me?

This change is a minor modification to our internal incident handing process. The material impact to you is simplification of your support experience.

Why is this change taking place?

This change was implemented based on data received on submitted incidents, resolution times, customer feedback, and overall industry trends.

What is not changing?

Our SLAs and commitment to delivering a world-class customer experience.

Where can I get more information about this change?

This knowledge base article details the new changes. In addition, the process to request a ticket escalation remains unchanged. Please reach out to noc@ctl.io if you have any questions.

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Like most people, I have a mobile phone that is representative of my personality and productivity needs. Carefully chosen phone cases, background images, apps, and settings all create a level of personalization within the boundaries defined by my phone provider. My phone is basically a platform for delivering what I want, how I want it. Why can't your cloud behave the same way?

CenturyLink Cloud has offered a deep set of channel-friendly features for years. This month, we went even further to make sure that all our customers have greater control over their cloud experience. What does it mean to make our cloud your own?

Control the Appearance

Change how the CenturyLink Cloud Control Portal looks to your customers and users. Alter not only the color scheme and logos, but go deeper with modifications to listed support phone numbers, email addresses, and Knowledge Base links. Tweak the outbound email templates so that new users get a personalized message when they join the account.

Control the Access Point

With this latest software release, it's easy to use a non-CenturyLink branded domain to access the Control Portal. All customers can immediately use {account alias}.cloudportal.io to see a personalized login page with their logo. Soon, we'll make it...

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As a cloud architect, trying to explain to my family and friends what I do is sometimes amusing and often times a frustrating experience. Cloud is a term that is greatly overused and because of that everyone has a definition. For me, cloud is all about automation.

For end users who have had to endure extremely long procurement and delivery cycles for IT services, automation can be an intoxicating thing. Automation equals possibility… It is a powerful capability, and when used appropriately, can drive your business forward. It is all about speed, and wrapped in the economics of a public cloud model, enables businesses to try new ideas, launch new applications or expand into new geographies in a low risk way.

However, without an appropriate level of financial governance, automation can bring on storm clouds. It is not uncommon that I speak with organizations that have embraced public cloud only to have to change their course a short while later because they spent far more than originally anticipated. Pricing model transparency, or lack thereof, by a Cloud Service Provider is certainly a cause of these types of challenges. The real challenge is lack of financial governance or visibility into spend.

But don’t...

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Transparent Corporate Access to the CenturyLink Public Cloud

Identity and Access Management solutions help enterprise IT integrate multiple systems with existing authentication services. These capabilities play a crucial role in public cloud services, where IT is keen to avoid “shadow IT” and deliver self-service access to resources without compromising important InfoSec policies.

Simplifying this process for our customers via automation is a top priority – that’s why our Control Portal includes APIs and webhooks. We also support SAML for federation, single sign-on (SSO) and multifactor authentication (MFA).

That’s “identity.” So what about “access”?

Today, we released a new permissions model that implements an expanded role-based access control (RBAC) capability. These new features empower administrators to grant more granular access to specific areas of the CenturyLink Cloud Control Portal to users.

We’re rolling out eight roles (below) with varying degrees of access, each specifically designed to align with job functions seen within many enterprises today.  The upshot is fine-tuned access control, and enabling a “least-privilege” approach to enterprise cloud management.

Cloud Access that Looks Like Your Current Access

These roles reflect the most frequently requested levels of access, mapping to unique personas.  They range from full control (Account Administrators), specialized areas of expertise (Server Administrators, Server Operators,...

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Q&A with James Newkirk, CenturyLink Cloud VP of Engineering

This week CenturyLink will celebrate the opening of our Cloud Development Center in Bellevue, WA.  I sat down with James Newkirk, Engineering VP for CenturyLink Cloud, who anchored the team designing and overseeing the build out of the new Center’s space to get his insights on what went into the design.

Why did we select Bellevue, WA as the home of our new Cloud Development Center?

Seattle and its surrounding area are the growing center of the cloud universe. We know that if we want to tap into the growing talent pool of cloud computing experts and developers, the greater Seattle area is a great place to be.

We chose our new location in Bellevue for a couple of reasons.  First, as a nod to our heritage with Tier 3 which was founded and headquartered in Bellevue.  Secondly, was access to transportation – a lot of employees use public transport and our new location is close to the transit center.  Finally it’s very central to great restaurants – we wanted employees to have options to get quality food on lunch breaks or easy access to social outlets. We all know engineers like food.

It’s a...

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Today we are pleased to announce one-click access to cloud-based managed serviceson the CenturyLink Cloud in the UK.

CenturyLink Cloud managed services provide automated provisioning of operating systems and applications – check the box when you need them, uncheck when you don’t – all billed hourly.  When paired with our easy-to-use cloud infrastructure, you get up and running quickly with the peace of mind you need from managed apps and operating systems.

Now customers in the UK or global customers using UK nodes can mix and match cloud-based managed services, public and private cloud, and even colocation – all under one roof. This suits enterprises who want to embrace hybrid IT as part of their cloud journey, as well as those who just want to leave legacy applications where they are for the time being, but have access to the flexibility of cloud infrastructure when they need it.

With this launch, customers can take advantage of the following services from our Slough data center: Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux managed operating systems, as well as managed applications Active Directory, Apache HTTP Server, Apache Tomcat, Microsoft Internet Information Services, Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL.

And, if you want even more assistance, our cloud experts...

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Our latest platform release went live earlier this week. Check out the release notes. As usual, we’re focused on increasing automation, security, and flexibility. Here are a few of the highlights, along with some details that illustrate how users can take advantage of these new capabilities.

‘Execute Packages’ - Server Management using Automation

Cloud computing isn’t just about provisioning servers. You have to administer them too. Ideally, you could administer these servers in bulk, and avoid the pain of one-offs.

CenturyLink Cloud has several options to help you manage servers in bulk (groups, scheduled tasks, alerts, power operations, and more). But perhaps the most powerful solution available to users? The newly re-factored capability to execute Blueprint packages. With the latest enhancements to the Groups user experience, you can run a script package on any or all of the servers in a Group with just a few clicks.

CenturyLink Cloud includes several publicly available packages for customers to use. Need to install SQL Server? There’s a package for that. How about Active Directory? There’s a package for that too. Looking for the LAMP stack? Yep, there’s a package for that. You get the idea.

But best of all, you can create your own custom...

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There’s no shortage of DevOps experts these days.  These luminaries are everywhere - blogs, social media, trade shows, you name it.  Most agree that DevOps best practices fall into three categories: People, Process, and Tools.

You can read all about those in this space, and elsewhere. But once you look past the slideware, the conferences, and the consultants – one question lingers.

What does DevOps look like in a workplace?

How do the principles of collaboration, instant feedback, cross-functional teams, and shared objectives actually come together in a physical office?

As we designed our new CenturyLink Cloud Development Center in Bellevue, a few delegates from the CenturyLink Cloud team had the opportunity to create the perfect environment for DevOps. And, to do it from scratch, with few restrictions.  After all, this Center was one of the major components underpinning CenturyLink’s acquisition of Tier 3 nearly a year ago.

So what are some of the results?

Team rooms, organized by function.  The majority of our space is dedicated to “team rooms” – large, open rooms where employees are grouped by workstream (platform team, application services team, service engineering, etc.). As we build new features and push them to production, all the people you need to interact with...

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Cloud. It’s a disruptive force. Here in Seattle some may think of it only in terms of weather, but at CenturyLink we know it’s something much greater and its impact on our organization is being felt company wide. It’s been less than a year since CenturyLink acquired Bellevue-based Tier 3 and branded it CenturyLink Cloud. At the time we announced our plans of opening the Cloud Development Center in the Seattle area, saying “Tier 3’s products, roadmap and vision are now the foundation of CenturyLink’s cloud strategy and anchor the new Seattle-based CenturyLink Cloud Development Center.”

Why Seattle? It turns out Seattle is the center of the cloud universe. Forbes ranked it the best city for tech jobs. We all know that Amazon has an enormous campus in South Lake Union, Microsoft is headquartered in Redmond, but did you know Google’s development center for cloud is based in Seattle and Kirkland? And, since the entire country believes it rains here 24/7, can you think of a more natural place for the Cloud Development Center to be placed?

Officially opening on October 14th, the CenturyLink Cloud Development Center encompasses almost 30,000 square feet in Bellevue, WA. Beyond its partnership with CenturyLink Field –...

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New cloud node in Toronto gives customers more choice and flexibility for Canadian-based cloud services

The CenturyLink Cloud global footprint expansion continues.

Today, we’re excited to give customers a new public cloud deployment option in Canada. Effective immediately, customers can deploy and manage virtual resources in our “CA3” cloud node in our CenturyLink Toronto “TR1” facility.

For businesses based in Canada, and those that _do_ business in Canada – this new CenturyLink Cloud node offers several benefits: data sovereignty (for compliance), performance (host your apps close to your users) and the best aspects of having the CenturyLink Public Cloud available in a CenturyLink facility:

• Scale.  The CA3 node is built to handle the pent-up demand for cloud services in Canada.
• Advanced connectivity. CenturyLink customers who already deploy resources in our TR1 location can now connect existing infrastructure to our public cloud offering. Customers using nearby TR3, our new Toronto data center opening later this year, will also be able to take advantage of this capability.
• Self-service access to a robust set of cloud services. Users have Lots of options to build and manage enterprise cloud environments.

Have additional questions? We’ve got answers!

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What cloud services are available in this location?

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Our new CA3 facility boasts the full CenturyLink Public...

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Last month CenturyLink Cloud announced some major pricing changes that took effect instantly for many customers. The adjustment to public  bandwidth pricing –  from a 95/5 billing model to $0.05 per GB transferred outbound – took effect on June 1st and gives our customers one of the lowest entry-level bandwidth prices in the cloud. 

Our latest monthly platform release reflects this bandwidth change in a few places. First, the bandwidth graph on the CenturyLink Cloud dashboard now shows you how much data has been transferred over public IPs. And because we’ve moved to a simpler bandwidth calculation, your real-time consumption is now rolled into our ever-present cost widget. This helps customers see their costs as they happen versus waiting until invoice time to see how the bandwidth charges were calculated for the month. Customers will also see their bandwidth consumption clearly called out on the monthly invoice. Pricing and consumption transparency is key as you assess your spend and make on the fly adjustments based on forecast usage. For more on our bandwidth update, take a look at the FAQ in our Knowledge Base.

We also introduced some major changes to the “create server” process in the CenturyLink Cloud. The new experience...

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The CenturyLink Cloud team has brought two new data centers online.  Customers can now deploy virtual resources in Santa Clara, CA (UC1) and Sterling, VA (VA1) sites.  This brings our total count of federated data centers to 11 - six in the US, two in Canada, two in the UK, and one in mainland Europe.  Expect more investment in this footprint in the months to come.

There is something special about these new sites, our first new locations since the acquisition.

When CenturyLink acquired Tier 3, it was a big investment for the parent company.

The message to the market was clear: Cloud is CenturyLink’s growth engine for the future.  We’re investing in a cloud-first platform that can solve enterprise IT jobs better than any other provider.

How do we solve them better?

By offering a superior breadth of managed services and infrastructure…with unmatched integration between products.

These new locations are a major milestone towards this vision.  Three reasons why:

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Elasticity and quick provisioning are hallmarks of any good cloud platform. Cloud customers have gotten used to rapidly acquiring right-sized resources that fit a given workload. No longer do developers have to build the biggest (physical) server possible just to avoid requests to resize later on. Rather, provision for what you need now, and adjust the capacity as the usage dictates. But how do you know when it’s time to size up?

The CenturyLink Cloud engineering team just released a monitoring and alert service (alongside our powerful server UI redesign) that gives you the data you need! We designed this feature with three things in mind:

 1. Offer a simple, straightforward toolset that users can understand and take advantage of quickly.

 2. Deliver reliable, accurate statistics that reflect the current state of a server.

 3. Provide multiple ways to identify that an alert was fired.

Together, these three principles kept us focused on delivering a service that met market need. Let’s take a look at how the new monitoring and alert service applies each principles.

Simple Setup

It’s easy to get lost in a sea of rarely-used options offered by a monitoring platform. Instead, we focused on ease of setup, a common theme...

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Today, we announced the availability of Hyperscale instances, a new service that combines our high-end compute with 100% flash storage.  Before we jump into how customers can use the service, let’s take a minute to think about the characteristics of applications and architectures deployed today. 

Here are 5 key attributes we’ve noticed:

Now, think about most applications running in enterprise data centers.  In all 5 cases, it’s almost the exact opposite.

That’s NoSQL vs. relational databases in a nutshell.  The folks at MongoDB sum it up pretty well:

If you’re a CIO, it’s simple.  The more relational systems you have, the slower you can respond to the market.  Relational databases will always have their place.  But most of the innovation happening in the next 5 years will be on NoSQL platforms.

Of course, the public cloud is...

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Tier 3 has joined CenturyLink.  We are going to build amazing things together.

But let’s look back before we look ahead.

Many people contributed to the success of Tier 3.  Developers launched feature after feature, while network engineers supported customers day and night.  A passion for problem solving fueled their achievements.  A tireless team of marketing, sales, and finance pros helped along the way as well – building our thought leadership campaigns, winning new business, and keeping our back office humming.

I’d like to thank these talented individuals.  This is the team that built APIs, designed the UX, rolled out new self-service functions, and helped our customers grow.  We’ve worked with lots of great partners too.  Together, we advanced cloud computing.

Cloud is really, really hard.  Just read the headlines – enterprises and traditional IT vendors are struggling.

We started Tier 3 to make cloud easier.  We created products, processes, and a culture to help enable cloud for the enterprise.

And cloud is a littler easier now, thanks to Tier 3’s ecosystem of people and partners.

This deal would not be possible without Tier 3’s customers.  Their support, their decision to trust a smaller company for their cloud needs, and their feedback on how we could improve...

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“Getting a little bit of the right information just ahead of when it’s needed is a lot more valuable than all the information in the world a month or a day later.” That quote – found in the book The Two Second Advantage by Vivek Ranadive and Kevin Maney – highlights a new reality where responsiveness can be a competitive advantage. Smart companies are building a responsive IT infrastructure where data isn’t just hoarded in massive repositories, but analyzed quickly and acted upon. How can you know more, faster and have better situational awareness?

With an increasing amount of critical IT systems running in the cloud, there’s a need to know what’s happening and act on it. This month, CenturyLink Cloud introduced Webhooks, making us among the first public IaaS cloud providers to send real-time notifications to a web service endpoint. For this initial release, customers can set up Webhooks for events within accounts, users, and servers.

When To Use This?

Webhooks are relatively new idea, although already used by diverse web properties like Wordpress and Zoho. Let’s look at three different scenarios where CenturyLink Cloud Webhooks can lead to better decisions.

Scenario #1 – Data Synchronization

Polling is an inefficient way to retrieve data...

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In a few weeks, CenturyLink Cloud will roll out the first phase of visual changes to our Control Portal cloud management software. These changes are not only visually stunning, but functionally significant for our customers. Why are we making these changes, and what should you expect? This blog post dives into our motivation for the changes, and provides a sneak peek into what’s coming in the months ahead.

Why the Change?

We’ve all heard the saying “if ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” CenturyLink Cloud constantly receives positive recognition for our Control Portal, and Gartner recently lauded our “easy-to-use self-service portal” that showcases an “excellent, highly differentiated set of features.” Why are we moving forward with some substantial modifications to the user experience? We’re focused on five reasons:

• Improve Application Performance. Web applications need to be fast to maximize utility, and so too does our Control Portal. We want our users to spend _less time _in our interface, create and manage complex environments, and more time solving strategic business problems. We’re constantly tweaking the current software experience to squeeze out performance improvements, but needed to take a new approach if we wanted to speed up the experience _and achieve new embedded analytics functionality. Our

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Elasticity is a core tenet of cloud computing. Cloud has become so popular simply because resources can be adjusted up or down, based on business need, instantly. Manually resizing cloud environments is still MUCH easier than altering physical hardware. But human action is still required, adding human cost to cloud.

A few cloud vendors have attempted to automate this process through “auto scaling” – services that expand and reduce the size environments based on user-defined parameters. However, this capability by and large automates the addition and removal of virtual machines to an existing resource pool.  In engineering terms, this is “horizontal scaling” – adding capacity across multiple virtual machines. This approach is useful for consumer applications (think Netflix scaling up for Saturday night), but the enterprise scenario is much different, as we found out in our market research when developing this feature.

While we always recommend that our customers build highly available cloud systems with no single points of failure, there is value is sizing those resources up and down (i.e. “vertical scaling”) instead of only being able to add or remove entire servers. Having multiple servers is key for fault tolerance, but some workloads can benefit from additional server capacity, not...

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We generate massive amounts of data every day. Research firm IDC estimates that 90% of the world’s data was created in the last two years, and the volume of data worldwide doubles every two years. Enterprises are a key contributor to this data explosion as we produce and share digital media, create global systems that collect and generate data, and retain an increasing number of backup and archive data sets. This rapid storage growth puts pressure on IT budgets and staff who have to constantly find and allocate more usable space. CenturyLink Cloud wants to help make that easier and just launched a new Object Storage service to provide you a secure, scalable destination for business data.

What is Object Storage from CenturyLink Cloud? It’s a geo-redundant, elastic storage system for public and private digital data. Based on the innovative Riak CS Enterprise platform, Object Storage infrastructure is being deployed across three global regions: Canada, United States, and Europe. Each region consists of a pair of CenturyLink Cloud data centers that run Riak CS Enterprise on powerful, bare-metal servers. The Object Storage nodes are deployed in a “ring” configuration where data is evenly distributed across the nodes, thus assuring that your...

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Customer-driven innovation is baked into our company’s DNA. We’re always looking for ways to help customers create and manage enterprise-class environments on our platform.

One thing they’ve told us in recent months is that they want to be able to quickly find all of the diverse resources they’ve created in the CenturyLink Cloud cloud. We heard that request loud and clear and just released Global Search which is a unique capability that dramatically improves your user experience.

What is Global Search? It’s a platform-wide utility that lets you search for accounts, users, servers, Groups, networks, cloud orchestration Blueprints, Blueprint packages, and IP addresses – all from a single search box that is always displayed at the top of each page in our Control Portal.

The IT Professional Scenario

This powerful feature works with partial matches, which means that you can type a word like “Exchange” and get back any CenturyLink Cloud resource in your account hierarchy that is related to a Microsoft Exchange mail server. Below, see that this particular search returned some servers that are running Exchange Server, groups residing in different data centers, an account with the word “Exchange” in the description field, and a Blueprint.

Our design team studied the best search...

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The shift to cloud services is, in part, about empowering business users to manage more of their own IT needs themselves. To wit, traditional infrastructure service providers are rapidly introducing self-service, elastic capabilities to meet market demand. Enterprises can deliver on their “IT-as-a-Service” roadmap with a branded cloud administrative portal – complete with rapid provisioning – that matches corporate guidelines.

Solving this scenario has been a roadmap priority for CenturyLink Cloud. So we are pleased to announce new functionality today that helps resellers, ISVs, and enterprise IT shops deliver a personalized version of our cloud. Leading infrastructure provider like PEER 1  have found success with our model, and so can you.

How do we deliver a personalized cloud? Five key ways: user interface rebranding, content settings, email templates, single-sign-on support, and API access. Let’s briefly look at each of these.

User interface rebranding

Easily alter the visual appearance of the Control Portal, our web-based cloud management interface. This is the easiest – although most superficial – way to rebrand our cloud as your own. We provide two collections of settings for changing the look and feel of the admin console. The Site Branding settings let you define (1) the name of the site, and (2) the graphic logo...

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The November update to our enterprise cloud platform brought with it all sorts of valuable capabilities including a new Canadian data center, enhancements to our self-service networking, an upgrade of the Platform as a Service PaaS to the latest version of Iron Foundry, the introduction of first-of-its-kind Billing/Account/User management APIs, and more. What I’ll highlight today is the ability to do self-service disk resize from within our Control Portal.

Elastic Machines Result in Better Value

Properly sizing a server has always been a challenge because you need to try and anticipate future need. Do you allocate just enough resources to get by, or do you leave yourself lots of headroom in case of spikes in usage or unexpected growth? These decisions often lead to over-provisioning that results in idle CPU cycles, unused storage, and wasted money. Up until now, CenturyLink Cloud customers have been able to modify CPU and memory allocation on demand. This has proved very useful for organizations that wanted to be conscious of cost while not getting locked into an undersized server instance. Our customers have also asked us to add disk growth to our collection of self-service capabilities, so that's what we've done.

Feature Walkthrough

To demonstrate, I created...

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Expansion of global partnership to North America delivers superior solution to enterprises requiring geo-specific services

VANCOUVER, BC – December 10, 2012 – PEER 1 Hosting (TSX:PIX), the global IT hosting provider, and CenturyLink Cloud, the enterprise cloud platform company, today announced that their VMware-based, enterprise-grade cloud platform is now available in Canada. Businesses can now deploy applications on secure, enterprise cloud services in nodes located in Toronto today and Vancouver early next year.

Built with IT and development operations in mind, enterprise cloud services from PEER 1 Hosting and CenturyLink Cloud include IaaS, PaaS and advanced cloud management.  This complete cloud platform helps businesses reduce IT complexity and operational burden.  The joint offering addresses the enterprise cloud requirement for “data sovereignty” – ensuring that data is stored and managed according to Canadian rules and regulations.  In addition to compliance with Canadian requirements, the partnership offers customers global scale, with additional nodes in North America and Europe. 

Global enterprises can scale their CenturyLink Cloud-based enterprise cloud effortlessly by leveraging PEER 1 Hosting’s proprietary 10Gbps FastFiber Network™ to connect the Toronto node and planned Vancouver node to data centers in London and Reading, U.K. or easily extend infrastructure to additional CenturyLink Cloud nodes in New...

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As we often say here at CenturyLink Cloud, the cloud should create choice, not limit it.  And today is a good day for that guiding philosophy.

We’re excited about a new program from Cloud Foundry - the Cloud Foundry Core.   Their blog entry today sums up the news:

The Cloud Foundry team is happy to announce Cloud Foundry Core  -  a program designed to preserve cloud application portability.

In the cloud computing world, preserving a choice of clouds is critical. The risks of being locked into a single cloud are substantial. Pricing, reliability, geographic location and compliance can all vary between clouds. Business requirements will evolve over time, necessitating the ability to move between clouds, whether public to private, private to public or between public cloud providers.

Why this is a Good Thing for Developers and Enterprise IT

Enterprises to different degrees have embraced cloud infrastructure-as-a-service, and are now looking to see what platform-as-a-service offers.  Developers of course are leading the charge here.

The benefits of PaaS are straightforward enough – the PaaS does some of the heavy lifting for developers, including load balancing.  Over time, as PaaS becomes more capable, development within the enterprise becomes cheaper and faster, while lowering risk.  Why?  The PaaS abstracts...

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Enterprise Cloud Platform Provider Sets Sights on Expanding its Innovative Cloud Service Offering and Worldwide Growth

CenturyLink Cloud, Inc., the enterprise cloud platform company, today announced $10 million in Series B financing led by Intel Capital, with participation from returning investors Ignition Capital and Madrona Venture Group. This latest investment brings CenturyLink Cloud’s total financing to $18.5 million.

Since its founding in 2006, CenturyLink Cloud has focused on delivering enterprise-class cloud infrastructure (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) capabilities to global enterprises. The company is recognized for providing a comprehensive set of enterprise-grade cloud services in a unified platform. CenturyLink Cloud recently announced new cloud server group management capabilities to provide customers precise control of their workloads while minimizing server sprawl. This latest round of funding will allow CenturyLink Cloud to work with large global partners, such as the newly announced relationship with PEER 1 Hosting, extending its reach internationally, while continuing to build upon its core value proposition of IT operational agility and efficiency through comprehensive cloud services enhanced by orchestration, automation and advanced management capabilities.

The CenturyLink Cloud team has the technical ability and execution focus required to help transform the enterprise cloud market segment,” said Bryan Wolf, managing director...

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CenturyLink Cloud joins Red Hat ecosystem as a Certified Cloud Provider

BELLEVUE, Wash. — November 5, 2012 ― CenturyLink Cloud, Inc., the enterprise cloud platform provider, announced today it has joined the Red Hat Cloud ecosystem and is now a Red Hat Certified Cloud Provider.   Red Hat Enterprise Linux is immediately available to customers of CenturyLink Cloud’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service offerings.

“Today’s enterprises demand the flexibility to deploy the operating systems and run-times of their choice.  In fact, IT leaders are increasingly selecting unique combinations of technology to optimize the performance of specific workloads,” said Jim Newkirk, VP of engineering at CenturyLink Cloud. “Red Hat is one of the biggest proponents of enterprise cloud computing, and our partnership will help customers migrate more projects to the CenturyLink Cloud cloud with confidence.”

CenturyLink Cloud’s cloud services are designed for large and mid-sized businesses.  The company includes important enterprise features in its base products, including advanced security measures, risk mitigation and high availability.  This enables IT departments to bring applications and services to the cloud more easily with CenturyLink Cloud than other alternatives.

There’s also good news for enterprises that use on-premise images of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.  These customers that deploy cloud-based versions of this...

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High Availability SLA, Automatic Back Up and Offsite Replication Available on Pay as You Use Basis

PEER 1 Hosting (TSX:PIX), the global IT hosting provider, and CenturyLink Cloud, the enterprise cloud platform developer, today announced a partnership to deliver VMware-based enterprise cloud to the UK market.

The solution combines hosting services from PEER 1 Hosting with the enterprise-grade cloud platform from CenturyLink Cloud, and is underpinned by VMware’s vCloud platform; giving customers the ability to easily and successfully manage their businesses in the cloud.

Built with IT and development operations in mind, the enterprise cloud platform drives tangible return on investment, reduces time to market, makes it easier to manage complexity and minimizes operational requirements. Customers will also benefit from local data centers and regionalized disaster recovery along with an expanding global footprint of cloud nodes.

“Our partnership with CenturyLink Cloud means we can now offer enterprise customers an innovative, high performance cloud service with business continuity built right in,” said Fabio Banducci, President and CEO, PEER 1 Hosting. “This easy-to-manage cloud solution will allow customers to focus on growing their business without worrying about security, backup or compliance. Our unique utility-based pricing model also means they are paying only for what they need without having to...

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I am delighted to report that I have joined CenturyLink Cloud as the VP of Engineering. I joined CenturyLink Cloud for two primary reasons; its comprehensive cloud management offering that is built for agility, and its talented team with the ability to execute on its vision.

As I look at the various cloud computing offerings from other vendors, they focus on compute, storage, and networking. Don’t get me wrong; all of these are necessary. CenturyLink Cloud not only addresses these building blocks, but we optimize them for more agile infrastructure that is easy to use and, just as important, easy to manage for IT operational efficiency.

The second reason is the people. Years ago when I joined my first start-up, Clear Communications (no, it did not bring me riches), I made a decision that working with great people on a day-to-day basis was critical for my professional development. For example, even though I worked at Teradyne with Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) it wasn’t until I moved to Clear Communications that I began to work with him on a daily basis. I cannot underestimate how much I learned in a short period of time from working with him. I have met and...

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CenturyLink Cloud builds on an agile development methodology and we update our platform about once every six weeks, but this month’s release is a doozy! Over the last 48 hours we’ve released a major platform update that includes:

• Group server management tools
• Enhanced reporting
• Self-provisioning monitoring
• Scheduled tasks for all types of servers and groups of servers
• More than 400 additional new features and bug fixes

New Group VM Capability Eases Server Management

CenturyLink Cloud Groups is a new feature that allows users to logically group virtual machines by environment type, application, or any other user-specified criteria for easier server management. (Watch the demo video above.) With Groups you can manage large-scale deployments without the burden of configuring and monitoring each server individually. You can nest groups up to 32 levels deep—with policies and permissions automatically inherited by sub-groups and override functionality at every level.

• Schedule or perform management tasks (such as stopping and starting, rebooting, or setting to maintenance mode) across all servers in a group or sub-group
• Set default server configurations (e.g. OS version, DNS settings, VLAN) when a new server is provisioned within a group
• Adjust an environment’s footprint as needed by archiving and restoring a group of VMs with all policy and configuration settings intact, or

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New Platform and Database Services Join CenturyLink Cloud Enterprise Infrastructure Service, Setting New Bar for Comprehensive Cloud Platforms

BELLEVUE, Wash. — May 8, 2012 ― CenturyLink Cloud, Inc., the enterprise cloud platform company, today announced the next release of the CenturyLink Cloud Enterprise Cloud Platform, now with the industry’s most comprehensive set of enterprise-grade cloud services in a single consolidated platform. The CenturyLink Cloud cloud now features Platform as a Service, a multi-framework enterprise platform as a service (PaaS) and Data Fabric, a high availability database as a service (DbaaS).  These services join the company’s existing enterprise-grade infrastructure services for a powerful, first-of-a-kind combination that enables businesses to accelerate “greenfield” application development and deliver critical legacy business systems in one cloud platform.

Businesses around the world today rely on CenturyLink Cloud’s Enterprise Cloud – a VMware vCloud® Powered Service -  to run their back office and line of business applications in a secure virtual private cloud, counting on the platform’s availability, security, performance and built-in disaster recovery capabilities. Now with CenturyLink Cloud’s multi-language (“polyglot”) Platform as a Service, businesses gain the application development and deployment agility of cloud-based on-demand runtime environments, enabling developers to focus on business innovation without sacrificing stringent enterprise...

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First-of-a-Kind Federation Offers New Cloud Business Models to Providers Serving the Enterprise Market

BELLEVUE, Wash. — February 21, 2012 ― CenturyLink Cloud, Inc. today made its Enterprise Cloud Platform (ECP) – enterprise-grade, virtual private cloud software – available to the service provider market, creating the CenturyLink Cloud Federated Cloud. CFN Services, a leading provider of high performance network and application delivery solutions, is the first CenturyLink Cloud Federated Cloud partner. CFN Services will leverage the CenturyLink Cloud platform to create a Global Financial Services Cloud (also announced today) and offer cloud services to the broader enterprise market.

With the CenturyLink Cloud Federated Cloud, CenturyLink Cloud is now offering a global fabric of elastic cloud services created through the federation of service provider nodes all running the CenturyLink Cloud Enterprise Cloud Platform. To join the federation, a service provider brings a node anywhere in the world to be managed by CenturyLink Cloud. These service provider-owned, CenturyLink Cloud-managed nodes then work in federation with existing CenturyLink Cloud nodes, enabling service providers to immediately offer enterprise-grade, virtual private cloud. This first-of-a-kind model allows providers to serve the enterprise market with the ideal combination of their own local solutions, sales and support, coupled with enterprise-class cloud...

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Today we released automated provisioning of vpn services for our users. This is very exciting as it is part of our total goal of full automation and self servicing on our platform. Now with a single click of creating your server we will build out your VPN services without any configuration or setup from you all on demand. We have been working on this for a while and have been using this product under the covers which up until now was just for testing. If you already have VPN services with us then you will migrated over the next 6 months and someone from your account team will contact you. Here is a quick run down of the features:

• No configuration required! All of the routing and setup is done for you automatically!
• Works with Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux
• First concurrent user is free!
• It will automatically build out your vpn server when you build your first server.
• You can add or remove users via the control system
• Only 25.00 per concurrent user and bandwidth costs per month.
• Each customer gets their own instance which gives better performance and isolation than traditional models.
• It is based on standard Open VPN which is widely tested and supported.
• Can

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CenturyLink Cloud has settled into a nice release cadence and today marks the end of another development cycle. Our platform is being updated frequently, and today’s release is accompanied by a new “release notes” process initiated by our product management team. Immediately upon each platform release, the CenturyLink Cloud team will publish a set of release notes to the Knowledge Base. The August 1st release notes outline the six new features and fifty minor fixes that were part of this push.

Let’s take a look at two of the new platform features and see how they make our users more efficient.

Add multiple instances of the same software package to a Blueprint

Customers use blueprints, which is CenturyLink Cloud’s server orchestration technology, to model complex server environments. One key aspect of blueprints is the ability to include software and scripts in the build process. Imagine building an n-tier system environment made up of web servers and database servers. Developers and system administrators use blueprints to create a template made up of all the server configurations and software that define that system. That blueprint can then be deployed again and again with little effort.

Up until now, it was difficult to add the same software/script...

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We are pleased to announce our new control panel interface with the following new features:

• New dashboard page that shows the account billing summary and also overall bandwidth for the account.
• Increased logon performance by 10x so that you wont have to wait for the dashboard page to load.
• New server list page that shows the CPU, Storage Allocation, and Memory usage.
• Server Price calculator now shows the hourly cost of each component of a server before build out.
• and much more!

The new interface is part of a big effort to optimize the user experience for all of our customers and increase overall speed in gaining access to critical data. There are over 50 additional bugs fixed in this latest build. Thanks CenturyLink Cloud Team

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We have just released a new version of our API and have decided to just make it available online so you wont have to ask for it! The API has been built along side all of the features of the platform with the idea that if you can do it in the control system you can do it via our API. The API currently supports Xml, JSON, and SOAP which is far more featured than any of the other API’s that we have seen out there. Go check it out: www.ctl.io/api-docs/v2 Create an API user here: https://control.tier3.com/security/api As always, anything you need or see that we could improve on let us know!

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Build 672 has gone live with new features and bug fixes for the vpn service and control system. Here are some of the key new features:

• Managing VPN Max Concurrent Users): You now have the ability to control the number of concurrent users and control your costs. In our system the first concurrent connection is always at no cost and anything after that is at $15.00 / Month. Now you can go in and change this level at any time. So if you need to add more concurrent users go to control.tier3.com > network tab > vpn > edit vpn settings.
• Two Factor Authentication with Active Directory: Now you can configure your vpn service to do two factor authentication via active directory. This will require the user to have not only a certificate but will be prompted for their active directory credentials.
• New Templates: Added Windows XP 32-bit, Windows Vista 32-bit, Windows Vista 64-bit, and Windows 7 32-bit templates.
• Welcome Screen: We have added your CPU, Memory, and Storage counts to the welcome page.

There was a total of 20 bugs that also were fixed in the current build. As always if you need anything please let us know as we are constantly adding new...

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Today is SysAdmin Day, and we at CenturyLink Cloud would like to show our appreciation of system administrators around the world. To commemorate the occasion, we’ve made a comic to show how CenturyLink Cloud’s enterprise cloud platform can save admins time and effort—and turn them into office heroes.

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Many of you have noticed the upgrade of your CenturyLink Cloud Client VPN service, which allows you to connect to the secure network that contains your servers and resources. Read on to learn more about the service and the enhancements made with this update.

Overview

Client VPN enables users to connect to their secure isolated network. Each account has its own isolated VPN service provided at no charge. This built-in service is managed by CenturyLink Cloud’s highly trained network operation center. If you have any issues please look at the status system or contact support.

To complete the Client VPN initial configuration, simply download the certificate—used when connecting to the VPN service—or complete the two-factor authentication that we’ve linked to below. To learn more about ways to connect such as persistent VPN connections or direct connections please go here.

Current Limitations

There are only a few limitations on this service as it is based on the OpenVPN project.

• Maximum concurrent users: 20 (if you need additional users, please contact support)
• Maximum connection: 1Gbps

Performance and Tuning Enhancements

We’ve made a host of performance and tuning enhancements to the Client VPN service that will result in a better user experience. We decreased CPU utilization on each unique instance from 80%...

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We are always working to resolve bugs and add features to the control system. This update is a major bug update and here are the items that have been fixed in this build!

• Incorrect calculation of total server resources allocated to an account which was causing errors on server create.
• Create snapshot button was available when it should not be.
• Archived Lab Groups appeared in the Lab Group DDL on new server create.
• Fixed error that occurred when creating new Accounts (no bug was created for this).
• Added Account Alias validation to ensure that duplicate Account Aliases do not get created.
• Fixed the DateTime display on the Lab Scheduled Task list to be customer time zone aware, as opposed to displaying in UTC
• DNS Management errors on updating and creating aliases

If you have any questions please feel free to let us know.

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32 GB of ram servers from the control system and multiple IP addresses!

We released build 690 today of our platform and other than the usual bug fixes and tweaks we added two new features:

32 GB servers from the Control Portal and API

Now you can add up to 32 GB of RAM to any server when ever you want with no long term commit as it is just hourly. Scale it up or down when needed!

To do this via the control system simply go to the server you are wanting to change and click the edit server button. Once there it is just a reboot away (about 1 minute of downtime) and you now have the ram needed from 1 GB to 32 GB within minutes.

Multiple IP addresses to a single server

With our new multiple IP address feature you can add the IP addresses that you need for a specific server all via the control system. To add an IP address go to Networks > IP Addresses > Add External Address. From there you can add an external IP address to your server or have it assign a new address for you. Once you have added an external address or...

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Features Advance IT Operations Automation, Enhance Performance; See Demo at Interop New York October 5-6

BELLEVUE, Wash.—October 4, 2011—CenturyLink Cloud, Inc. today announced two new features to enhance the performance and IT operation automation (auto-ops) capabilities of its enterprise-class virtual private cloud: CenturyLink Cloud Autoscaler 2.0 and the self-service management of load balancers based on Citrix® NetScaler® VPX™ via CenturyLink Cloud’s Management Control Portal or API.

With its Autoscaler 2.0, CenturyLink Cloud takes a unique approach to eliminating performance hits that can occur when only scaling in real time. Typical autoscalers only provision extra servers in response to increased demand, known as “horizontal scaling.” CenturyLink Cloud’s Autoscaler 2.0 scales predictively based on historical usage patterns, not just reactively in response to the current load, and does so both vertically and horizontally. Predictive scaling with defined business rules based for risk tolerance ensures appropriate resources are allocated ahead of need—without requiring IT operations staff to manually optimize resources. By allowing enterprises to scale up, instead of—or in addition to—out, CenturyLink Cloud’s Autoscaler enables a more agile methodology and better performance for many enterprise applications.

The increased data loads resulting from standard usage swings as well as major events can put significant strain on any...

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Integrated app management combines with CenturyLink Cloud platform to create an unparalleled solution for deploying and managing business-critical apps

SEATTLE and SAN FRANCISCO – December 6, 2011 – New Relic Inc., the SaaS web application performance management (APM) provider, and CenturyLink Cloud, the enterprise cloud platform provider, announced today that CenturyLink Cloud has enhanced its leading enterprise-grade public cloud platform with the addition of New Relic Standard, now available free of charge to its public cloud customers. Organizations deploying business-critical apps on CenturyLink Cloud will now have deep, real-time visibility into application performance, which combines with CenturyLink Cloud’s offering to create an unparalleled solution for deploying and managing apps in the cloud. CenturyLink Cloud provides an enterprise-grade virtual private or hybrid cloud. Architected for security, risk mitigation and high availability—with 99.999% SLA at all layers and disaster recovery in every deployment—CenturyLink Cloud’s cloud platform is optimized for production environments and mission-critical applications.

The addition of New Relic Standard, completely integrated with CenturyLink Cloud’s management control portal and its API, makes it easy for organizations to monitor end-user experiences and PHP, Ruby, Java, .NET, and Python applications in real-time. Organizations developing today’s multi-language cloud applications can proactively identify and diagnose potential performance issues...

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BELLEVUE, Wash., April 28, 2011 /PRNewswire/—CenturyLink Cloud, an enterprise cloud platform company, today announced that Channel IQ, the leading provider of online pricing intelligence and channel management solutions, has selected the company’s self-optimizing enterprise infrastructure to run its mission-critical applications and services. Channel IQ, which provides manufacturers and retailers real-time, on-demand applications for product pricing visibility within online sales channels, spent a year evaluating and testing different infrastructure providers before selecting CenturyLink Cloud for its agile platform that delivers all the benefits of cloud computing without the associated risks and performance compromises seen with other solutions. “We were looking for a utility-based model that would scale with our business as it grew and also allow us the freedom to focus on our core business—namely, our customers,” said Wes Shepherd, founder and CEO of Channel IQ. “The CenturyLink Platform provides the speed and performance, enterprise level security, and availability in a mission-critical environment that we can trust.” With more than 60 brand name manufacturing and retailing customers using Channel IQ to provide visibility into online channels, pricing and competition, Channel IQ needed a cloud platform provider it could trust to scale with dynamic pricing environments and its rapidly growing enterprise customer...

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Today we announced a significant shift in CenturyLink Cloud’s business model: in addition to offering our cloud “as a service” directly to enterprise customers around the globe, we are now offering our cloud software platform to service providers to enable them to stand up their own cloud services based on CenturyLink Cloud’s enterprise cloud platform.

With more than five years of innovative engineering built in, the enterprise-grade features and high performance characteristics have set CenturyLink Cloud’s cloud platform apart in the market. The power of this platform will be further amplified when it’s served as a global elastic fabric of cloud services – a growing footprint of federated, connected nodes that work in harmony to enable HA, DR and geo-specific services. Today we’ve announced a service delivery model, in conjunction with service provider partners, which enables just that.

Fast path to cloud revenue for midsize service providers around the world

The current cloud ecosystem is diverse and complex—and cloud customers are left to negotiate divergent services and service level agreements across providers. Accordingly there is real value and competitive advantage to be gained by those service providers who can easily provide comprehensive, global, yet easily managed and consumed cloud offerings to their...

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Performs Automatic, Policy-Based Backup of End-User PCs in the Cloud; See Demo at VMworld® 2011 Today Through September 1 in Booth 213

Today at VMworld® 2011, CenturyLink Cloud, Inc., an enterprise cloud platform provider, announced Client Backup, a secure, cloud-based file recovery application that ensures business continuity for users in the event critical data is accidentally deleted from individual computers. For no additional charge beyond the storage used, customers on the CenturyLink Cloud Enterprise Cloud Platform will now have current and past versions of their employees’ data available without relying on internal staff or local storage, and with no burden on end users. Most of the desktop backup solutions on the market today are meant for individual users, not optimized for entire organizations.

With a comprehensive web control panel and admin accounts allowing centralized management, CenturyLink Cloud’s Client Backup is aimed squarely at IT managers needing a complete desktop backup solution for their companies’ employees. “Accidentally deleting critical documents can be such a time waster as we search around—with fingers crossed—for possible back-ups or reluctantly resort to starting over completely; it’s happened to us all,” said Jared Wray, chief technology officer, CenturyLink Cloud. “With our new client backup capabilities, users can get...

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Aims to Help Enterprise Cloud Platform Company Continue to “Set the Bar for Cloud Performance” BELLEVUE, Wash. — June 20 2011 — CenturyLink Cloud, the enterprise cloud platform company, today announced that Mark Adams, chief development officer of Equinix, Inc., has joined CenturyLink Cloud’s board of directors. As the provider of the most secure, intelligent cloud platform for mission-critical applications and services, CenturyLink Cloud will leverage Adams’ years of strategic business development experience as it accelerates its growth in the rapidly expanding enterprise cloud market. “The team at CenturyLink Cloud is at the cutting edge of enterprise-class cloud platforms and is continuing to develop innovative predictive optimization technology that will set a new bar for cloud performance,” Adams said. “Leveraging my experience positioning Equinix as an enabler to rapidly growing cloud platforms, I’ll advise CenturyLink Cloud on customer and technology strategy as it grows into a leading provider of enterprise-class cloud platforms.” Adams joins outside directors John Connors, a partner at Ignition Partners and previously chief financial officer of Microsoft, and Matt McIlwain, managing director of Madrona Venture Group; both of which invested in CenturyLink Cloud earlier this year. Also on the board are Adam Wray, CenturyLink Cloud president and...

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By Adam Wray, CEO, CenturyLink Cloud Who should you fill your board member seat? An individual who will advance your company’s strategic vision and ability to execute. Filling an outside board member seat is a critical step at any stage of a company’s growth, but especially critical for an earlier stage company. While the temptation may be to court board members with broad industry name recognition, or company associations, this is only one of many variables to consider when targeting a new board member (and candidly of lower priority than several others). In beginning a search, factor what requisite expertise and knowledge are most valuable to leverage and how that background will integrate and complement your existing board. When we looked to expand our board to bring in another outside director, we developed a definitive set of skills and experience we felt would be accretive to our board, versus overlapping. Our two existing directors have great operational and venture finance backgrounds, so we were looking for was experience that could bring new and diverse insights, in particular around our core business, cloud computing. We found what we were looking for in Mark Adams, chief development officer of Equinix, Inc., a...

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Since the onset of Cloud Computing we’ve seen many changes in how we consume IT services. In her recent article “IT operations in the age of cloud: Brace yourself for change,”Alex Barrett outlines one of the most dramatic shifts in IT: operations teams. At CenturyLink Cloud, we know that shift is well underway as we see it today in the way we hire IT personnel: from operations to developers, no longer are these roles isolated from each other.

Instead of just repeating the message “you need to learn to code,” here are the tips, tricks, and resources that we use at CenturyLink Cloud to enable the transition to DevOps.

Don’t know how to code even a little bit? Start with a very simple project such as figuring out how to parse a log file with a language that you are interested in. Once you get that, go talk to a developer and ask him to review your code. Perhaps ask him then to pair program with you to add another feature on it for one hour as it pays off immensely.

Know how to code a bit? That is great! Next step is to take an honest look at your skill and find a project where can...

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Today we released an update to T3 Manager, our customer control panel. As part of our ongoing effort to improve our customer experience, we will be releasing monthly updates to T3 Manager. These updates will be focused on making it easier for our customers to manage their platform through new interface improvements and functionality.

Along with over 40 bug fixes and UI improvements, highlights from this month’s release include:

• Automatic Monitoring of All Servers: Monitoring of server resources such as CPU, memory, storage and OS disk is now automatically added when new Premium or Lab Servers are created.
• Premium Server Memory: Maximum memory capacity has increased to 64 GB for Premium Servers.
• Account Section Interface: Now account related items such as company information, payment method, users, permissions, notifications and API users are consolidated within an improved interface. Page load performance has also increased.
• Instant List Search: Get quicker search results on listing pages like the Server or Users page.
• Improved Logging: Improvements to the logging system now log more changes made to an account, user or server.

We hope you enjoy the improvements and find them as useful as we do.

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New Auditing Standards Provide Greater Independent Assurance of Controls and Processes

BELLEVUE, WA – February 20, 2012 – CenturyLink Cloud, the enterprise cloud platform provider, announced today that it has successfully completed the SSAE 16 Type II audit, ensuring that the company’s controls, processes and procedures conform to industry standards and best practices. The review was conducted by an independent auditing firm, and is effective from June 2011 through June 2012. SSAE 16 is a rigorous new standard that replaces the former SAS 70 audit. CenturyLink Cloud has been SAS 70 Type II audited since 2009 and began the SSAE 16 auditing process when it became the new standard.

Thorough, independent testing and reviews of controls across CenturyLink Cloud datacenters and other physical locations ensure the following areas meet SSAE 16’s demanding criteria:

• Oversight by executive management
• Operations and customer service
• Development and information technology organization
• Human resources policies and procedures
• Risk assessment monitoring

By undergoing the rigorous SSAE 16 Type II audit and expanding the scope of the audits to include more platforms and locations, our customers know they’re receiving the highest standards in service and controls” said Chris Brandon, CenturyLink Cloud CFO. “This audit furthers CenturyLink Cloud’s goal of enabling our customers to focus on their...

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