Bash Shellshock vulnerability – PATCHED
As explained last time the media got all excited by a security vulnerability; proactive security patching is all in a days work here at Layershift. So it shouldn’t come as any great surprise that we were once again all over this as soon as the appropriate patches were released by the relevant upstreams.
Two separate patches were issued in respect of this vulnerability, and they even have two separate CVE references for the pleasure: CVE-2014-6271 and CVE-2014-7169.
Timeline
This widely reported vulnerability was first publicised late on Wednesday afternoon, 24th September 2014, with patches provided and installed later that day / overnight. However, that first patch was found to be incomplete – alas CVE-2014-7169 was born!
Early on Friday morning, 26th September 2014, a new patch was issued, and once again our engineers have worked tirelessly to get it deployed across all of our platforms in short order.
Shellshock patch status
- Managed Cloud VPS – PATCHED
- Jelastic PaaS – PATCHED
- Managed dedicated – PATCHED
- Shared hosting – PATCHED
- Internal infrastructure – PATCHED
Transfer the environment not just the project
At Layershift we’re always looking for new ways to help you to be more efficient and productive. After all, Jelastic is the PaaS for people aiming for success; you don’t get to be successful by wasting your time repeating your work or grappling with awkward configurations!
We received lots of great feedback (thanks!) following the recent overhaul of our environment collaboration feature – allowing you to get the whole team working within 1 Jelastic account, and sharing individual environments with appropriate team members.
You told us loud and clear that it’s immensely helpful to have this convenient way to temporarily share an environment with a freelancer or agency. But, you said, what about when the freelancer starts the project off on the Jelastic platform and wants to hand ownership over to his client at the end? There should be a good way to handle that situation…
Well yes, we completely agree. Here it is!
Layershift Jelastic PaaS – unlimited edition
Hate trials that are so limited they’re effectively “crippleware”? Yeah, so do we! Sadly a few budding trialists brought it to our attention that we’re guilty of this heinous crime – today we’re putting that right.
The Jelastic PaaS is a polyglot platform, supporting applications authored in a variety of programming languages, and running a wide selection of application and database servers.
With this power comes great responsibility. A responsibility to set the resource limits high enough to suit a vast assortment of different technologies, frameworks, and server stacks. It turns out that some of your apps (particularly Java EE apps) are heavily performance limited – or may not run at all – with our old trial limits.
Jelastic PaaS saves you even more money this spring
Yes, we know that Spring started a little while ago, but a new lower price needs a nice headline so what can you do?
Great news! We’ve just slashed our Jelastic PaaS pricing, bringing the base cost down from £7.30 per cloudlet to just £4.75 per cloudlet!
But we didn’t stop there. We’ve also dramatically simplified our automatic volume discount tiers to just 3 levels – providing the maximum discount level to environments with as little as 16 cloudlets (previously required 512+ cloudlets for max. discount).
Jelastic now up to 75% cheaper than AWS
Even though AWS is predominantly an IaaS platform (not a PaaS like Jelastic), there’s no denying that they’re the industry benchmark. Many have already discovered that you can save big by switching from AWS to Jelastic, but now you can save even more – our latest price cuts deliver up to 75% saving just against their basic pricing:
AWS t1.micro instance in EU region with 10GB EBS + 1,000GB/month traffic:
$135.15 / month (approx. £80)
Equivalent Layershift Jelastic PaaS environment (hosted in the UK):
£18.98 / month (75% saving)
The example above assumes 80% server utilisation (which is quite high; even for a small server) – if your usage is actually lower you can potentially save a lot more by using Layershift’s Jelastic PaaS, because unlike AWS we charge for your actual usage rather than your requested server size.
That’s not to mention the huge time savings from using a fully-featured next generation PaaS vs. a basic IaaS!
Get your free Jelastic PaaS account
Save money with Jelastic’s new optimised Garbage Collector Agent
A few short months ago we explained how to experiment with custom JVM Garbage Collector settings on our Jelastic PaaS.
The fantastic development team behind Jelastic just announced that they too were hard at work experimenting with the GC, and as a result they’ve introduced new default GC settings to help to provide optimum performance right out of the box for all of your Java applications.
New default Garbage Collector settings
Prior to this update, Jelastic used the Serial GC by default if the Cloudlet Scaling Limit was set at or below 1GB (8 cloudlets), and the G1 GC by default if the Cloudlet Scaling Limit was set above 1GB.