Hi ~okeanos users,

The past few months, since the start of the beta phase, have been quite a ride. Your enthusiasm in ~okeanos was unexpectedly high! We've literally had thousands of new users coming in, who in turn have created hundreds of thousand of new VMs. This was way more than what we expected and a major cause for celebration. Yet, in the back of our heads we also knew that at some point we would need to take some measures before things get too crowdy.

We decided to think of VMs as 'meters' and set the boundary high enough to become a real task. And when one thinks in meters, why not set the boundary to the top: Mount Everest (8,848 m).

So, last week we made it! With your help.

We are currently serving more than 9000 VMs and our datacenter capacity has now reached sky-high limits!

At first, we thought about closing signups altogether but, due to overwhelming demand, we decided to leave the signups open and set the quotas of newcomers to 0. The rationale behind this decision is that we currently have more than enough users that are evaluating our service, so new users should gain resources only by joining an existing project or creating a new one. So, rest assured that any member of the Greek Academic and Research community will be able to use the service, provided he/she can create or join a project.

As for our plans for the months to come, we are already working hard to expand our infrastructure with new servers and even a new datacenter, to cope with the huge demand and take ~okeanos to the next level. Moreover, since some housekeeping needs to be done, we will gradually start cleaning up the users who are inactive, as well as users who no longer belong to the Greek Academic and Research Community, and start preparing for the official stable (out-of-beta) version of the service. Last but not least, during the above period, we will not let you with just what you have now. New, exciting features are coming up for you real soon.

Thanks a lot for your support,
the ~okeanos team