Hello everybody,

Two days left for beta and new features are already here!

As you may have already noticed, new things have popped up on your ~okeanos Web UI. And new things are under the hood too. Let's take a quick tour:

1. Active CPUs and RAM

Starting today, we introduce a new, more sophisticated tracking mechanism for your CPUs and RAM that will allow you to create even more machines. How does it work?

We now track only your active CPUs and RAM. This results in CPU and RAM usage only when your machine is running. If you shutdown your machine, CPUs and RAM get automatically freed and you will see their usage dropping to zero. This way, with the same CPU and RAM limits, you can create more machines and start only the ones you need each time.

2. CPU and RAM resizing

A lot of our users have been asking whether they can resize an existing machine with regard to its CPU and RAM. Well now you can!

A new action button called 'Resize' has appeared along with the other action buttons available for your machines. Just click it and select your new CPU and RAM flavor. That simple.

Please note that you can resize a machine only if it is shutdown.

3. Public IPs

Next to your 'machines' and 'networks' two new tabs just appeared. The first one reads 'public IPs'. Until now, every machine that you created got connected to the public network (Internet) and was automatically assigned a public IPv4 by the ~okeanos infrastructure. Although this was sufficient for most of you, our advanced users asked for even greater flexibility. So, we introduce Public IPs for everybody:

Public IPs are a new ~okeanos resource and you own them.

This means that now you have the power to decide which IPv4 goes to which one of your machines. You can create new IPs, destroy them, attach them and detach them to/from machines, whenever you wish. Since Public IPs are your new resource, you are able to track their usage under your Dashboard -> Usage tab, as happens with all your other resources. Finally, you now have the choice to create machines without IPv4 connectivity at all and connect them only to Private Networks.

4. SSH keys tab

The second tab next to 'public IPs' has to do with SSH key management as you already know it. There is no new functionality here; we just moved everything in a dedicated tab and created new icons for improved uniformity and usability.

5. Hotplugging

A major change in ~okeanos internals now allows you to connect/disconnect machines to/from networks and attach/detach public IPs on-the-fly, without the need for a machine reboot, as happened until now. All changes will take effect instantly with new NICs appearing automagically inside your machines after a successful action. Connect and you're on!

Now, let's go to the more procedural/boring stuff that you could do without, but are really important, since Wednesday the 18th is approaching fast:

As you may have already noticed under Dashboard -> Usage, your total limits have changed. The limits you have now, are the ones that will apply for all ~okeanos beta users. These are:

• 2 VMs
• 2 vCPUs
• 6GB RAM
• 100GB System Disk
• 5 Private Networks
• 1 Public IPv4
• 50GB File Storage Space

Additional resources will be granted to users only through Projects, and after manual approval by the ~okeanos team.

After the above change, some of you will find yourself over limit on some of your resources (over 100% at Dashboard -> Usage). You should do the corresponding actions that will get you back inside the new limits until:

Friday, Dec 20 2013, 12:00 EET (10:00 UTC)

To request additional resources, please apply for an ~okeanos Project through your Dashboard. For all users that are over limit after the above date, we will start enforcing quota limits, first by releasing IPs, then by shutting down machines. We are NOT going to destroy machines at this point and without prior notice.

Finally, if you are an ~okeanos advanced user that depends on IPv6, note that you may experience some intermittent connectivity issues until tomorrow night, since we are also preparing some IPv6 related features that will be announced and introduced alongside ~okeanos beta.

Thank you all for your overwhelming interest,
the ~okeanos team