Blog on Nine

Ubuntu Resolute: Evolution Instead of Revolution

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 01:00:00 +0000

With the 2026 Ubuntu LTS release, we’re seeing evolution instead of revolution across the board. Mostly small version updates, a recent kernel in version 7, and many updates under the hood.

An overview of available software versions for the most commonly used services can be found in our documentation.

What Does It Take to Implement a New Ubuntu Version?

Have you ever asked yourself what it takes us to implement a new Ubuntu LTS version in our ecosystem? It’s a little more complicated than imaging a USB stick. We’ll take you through our implementation journey.

Managed Kubernetes in Switzerland: An Honest Comparison of All Options

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 01:00:00 +0000

Anyone running Kubernetes in Switzerland will eventually face a decision: self-host, choose a local managed provider, or go with a hyperscaler. All three options work. They differ significantly in what your team needs to do afterwards.

This post compares the main options honestly, including where we ourselves are stronger or weaker.

Option 1: Self-hosted Kubernetes

Running Kubernetes on your own or rented infrastructure gives you maximum control. But that control comes at a price: the full Day-2 Operations burden falls on your own team.

Kubernetes in Production: Why Day-2 Operations Are Underestimated

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Kubernetes has become the de-facto standard for containerised workloads. According to the CNCF Annual Survey 2025, 82% of container users now run Kubernetes in production. Most teams starting out invest time and energy into cluster setup, writing their first Helm Charts, and deploying initial applications. It works and the cluster runs.

What comes next is routinely underestimated.

Day-1 vs. Day-2: The Real Work Begins After Launch

The term “Day-2 Operations” describes everything that happens after a platform is initially set up: ongoing maintenance, upgrades, security patches, monitoring, alerting, backup, and disaster recovery. In the Kubernetes world, this burden is substantial and grows with the number of workloads.

Looking Back on Our TechTalk #28

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Three talks that have little in common at first glance: a live attack on a Microsoft tenant, an engineering toolkit built over fifteen years and a database provisioned in under ten seconds. TechTalk #28 covered more ground than most, and that is exactly what made the evening stand out. As always, Thomas Hug, our CEO and founder, opened the evening with a short introduction before handing over to the three speakers.

From Google Analytics to Matomo: How We Migrated Our Web Tracking to Our Own Infrastructure

Thu, 21 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000

We replaced Google Analytics with Matomo, an open-source web analytics platform that we run on our own infrastructure in Switzerland. In this article, we describe why we made this move, how we implemented the migration technically, which Nine services we used, and what we gained and lost in the process.

Why We Replaced Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the default web tracking solution for many companies. We used it for years. Still, we had long been uncomfortable with the fact that all visitor data from our website was being transferred to Google servers in the US.

When the Red Light Goes On: How We Responded to the Linux Kernel 0-Day

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0000

There are days when the red light goes on for system engineers. April 30, 2026 was one of them.

At 8:29, an article regarding a 0-day exploit in the Linux kernel, publicly disclosed on cybersecuritynews.com, was shared in our internal Slack. CVE-2026-31431, nicknamed “Copy Fail”. A local privilege escalation in the Linux kernel, introduced in kernel version 4.14 in 2017. And – the cherry on top – a working exploit is already available on GitHub. A handful of lines of Python, and any unprivileged user is able to become root:

Before You Build AI Infrastructure: The Questions You Should Be Asking

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Imagine you’re training an internal language model on customer data, contracts and proprietary business information. The model delivers good results. Your team is happy. And then someone from the legal team asks: “Where are these workloads actually running?”

For many companies, the honest answer is: on AWS. Or Azure. Or GCP. That is, on servers in the USA, or on servers belonging to US companies, wherever in the world they happen to be located.

Looking Back on Our TechTalkThursday #27

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Our first TechTalkThursday of 2026 – number 27 in our event series – took place on the 10th of March 2026 at 18:00 in our office. Once again we made use of a Tuesday, so TechTalkTuesday continues to be an apt name. We welcomed three external speakers who all delivered captivating talks. It was a great evening with many attendees on site, including Nine employees, speakers’ guests and external visitors, all eager to learn about Roche Linux, the quirks of the Model Context Protocol and agentic engineering.

From Heroku to Deploio: How Renuo Mastered the Switch to Swiss Cloud Hosting

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 10:00:00 +0000

One Slack message, a seamless migration – and finally cloud hosting from Switzerland.

The Starting Point: Heroku Was No Longer Sustainable

Renuo AG is a Swiss software engineering company with a clear mission: write great code – preferably in Ruby on Rails. Server administration? Not their thing. For years, Heroku fulfilled exactly this purpose: push code, deploy, done.

Vibe Deploying: How Claude Code Migrated My 8-Year-Old Angular App to Deploio

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 10:00:00 +0000

You know the drill: There’s this server you should have updated ages ago. But there’s still that one app running on it that probably won’t work on the new server without modifications. So you leave it. Again and again.

For me, it was an Angular 4 app – the frontend for my personal accounting application. Self-built in 2017. Yes, back then there was no AI to do it for you. Since then, it’s been running beautifully, doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.

From WordPress to Hugo: Why We Migrated Our Website

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 10:00:00 +0000

We did it: After years with WordPress, we migrated our website to Hugo – a static site generator written in Go. In this article, we share our experiences and explain why this switch was the right decision for us.

Why the Switch?

WordPress is a fantastic CMS that powers a large portion of the internet. But for our needs as a hosting company with a technically skilled team, it was time to take a different path. Having a fast website was very important to us. After various improvements to the WordPress site with caching and other tricks, we hit a limit. On top of that, the site searches were still painfully slow. When a customer then sent us a screenshot of a timeout during a form submission, the pain was big enough to embark on the migration adventure!

Looking Back on Our TechTalkThursday #26

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 11:40:20 +0000

Our fourth and last TechTalkThursday in 2025 – it was number 26 of our event series – took place on the 2nd of December 2025 at 18:00 in our office. It was the first time on a Tuesday, so TechTalkTuesday might be more appropriate. Anyway, we proudly welcomed three external speakers who all held captivating talks. There were many people attending the event on site, also some interested Nine employees, a few speakers’ guests and a lot of external attendees interested in the topics of the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform, RAM xor Downtime and Data Localization for Application Services at Cloudflare.

Retirement of the ingress-nginx Project

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 10:55:18 +0000

We’re currently working on a proper strategy relating to the upcoming retirement of the ingress-nginx project, which is scheduled for March 2026. While we are very much aware of the deadline, we have not yet finalized our long-term replacement strategy. Currently, new developments regarding this topic seem to emerge frequently. Which is why we are investigating in multiple directions and would like to share our findings so far.

Adopting a Different «Pure» Ingress Controller

There are options to provide an installation of a different Ingress controller and allow customers to switch current Ingress resources to that new controller. While this might read like an appealing solution, it still requires some migration work (and a DNS change as the new controller would use a different public IPv4 address). The ingress-nginx project allows configuration via specific annotations on the Ingress resource itself. These annotations will not be supported by the new, alternative Ingress controller. Some projects came up with help in this regard. For example, HAProxy provides a migration helper website which allows to check if there is a HAProxy specific annotation available for an ingress-nginx one. The Traefik project built something like a compatibility layer, which allows to use some ingress-nginx annotations directly (they translate internally).

Why You Can Trust Our Servers To Be Fundamentally Secure

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 12:16:35 +0000

In the digital world, server security is not a “nice-to-have” but one of the cornerstones of a smooth operation. As a customer of a managed service provider, you trust that your infrastructure is robust and protected. But what does “secure” actually mean in practice?

Perhaps you have already run a security scan on your application and received a report listing potential vulnerabilities. These reports are valuable, but without the right context, they can also cause uncertainty.

Looking Back on Our TechTalkThursday #25

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 12:13:53 +0000

Our third TechTalkThursday in 2025 – it was number 25 of our event series – took place on the 4th of September 2025 at 18:00 in our office. We proudly welcomed three external speakers who all held captivating talks. There were many people attending the event on site, also some interested Nine employees, a few speakers’ guests and a lot of external attendees interested in the topics of Technical Debt, Software Companies Worrying About Infrastructure and NixOS.

«Digital = Emission-Free?»

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 05:58:52 +0000

This guest blog post was written for us by myclimate. We support the organisation with an annual contribution to climate protection. This year, we offset 189.5 tonnes of CO₂ worth CHF 4,738. myclimate, the leading climate protection organisation that has been working locally and globally for sustainable development and effective climate protection since its foundation in 2002, states that our climate protection contribution is having an impact: «Based on the calculated emissions, myclimate climate protection projects in Africa, Asia and Latin America are being supported.» The following article shows why this is also important in the ICT industry.

Looking Back on Our TechTalkThursday #24

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 08:04:05 +0000

Our second TechTalkThursday this year was number 24 of the event series and took place on the 5th of June 2025 at 18:00 in our office. We were happy to welcome three external speakers who all held very fascinating talks. There were almost 40 people attending the event on site, also some interested Nine employees, a few speakers’ guests and many external attendees interested in the topics of Human Centric AI, Chatbots, Large Language Models and Auth.

Compliance as a Competitive Advantage: How We Meet the Highest Data Protection Requirements

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 12:27:26 +0000

Data protection is no longer just a «nice to have»: for many organisations, it has become an indispensable core element of their compliance strategy. This is especially true in regulated industries such as government, finance, and healthcare, where companies handle particularly sensitive data. Today, strict requirements apply not only to where data is stored, but also to who is allowed to access it.

At Nine, we increasingly work with customers who have very high expectations when it comes to compliance and data protection. It’s no longer just about standard practices like encryption or access control: many organisations face specific regulatory requirements. For example, some customers are not only prohibited from storing data abroad, but must also technically prevent any access from outside Switzerland. ISO 27001 certification and Swiss data residency are therefore mandatory, but on their own, they’re not enough.

From Zero to Infra: Building a Production-Ready Setup Using Our API & Ansible

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 10:40:39 +0000

📖 The Story Begins

One common pattern we’ve observed at Nine is that many of our customers run web applications — think content management systems, web shops, dashboards, or custom APIs. These apps often rely on a tried-and-true combination of infrastructure services: a database to persist data, a cache layer for performance, and a server to run the application logic.

Looking Back on Our TechTalkThursday #23

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 09:42:16 +0000

The first TechTalkThursday in 2025 – and number 23 of the event series – took place on the 6th of March 2025 at 18:00 in our office. We were very pleased to welcome two external speakers and one 9er who all gave captivating speeches. There were around 30 people attending the event, some of them Nine employees, some speakers’ guests and many external attendees interested in the topics of autonomous coding agents, SCION – a new internet architecture – and live migration for containers on Kubernetes.

Looking Back on Our TechTalkThursday #22

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 11:29:07 +0000

Our TechTalkThursday #22 took place on the 5th of Dezember 2024 at 18:00 in our office. We were happy to welcome two external speakers and one 9er who gave a speech. There were around 40 people attending the event, some of them Nine employees, but also some speakers’ guests and many external attendees interested in the subjects of Kubernetes in hospitals, building generative AI-powered apps with MongoDB Atlas and service mesh.

Coworking With a View

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 14:27:52 +0000

With the first snow, we were enticed by the mountains: Our coworking retreat took place at the base of the Säntis at the end of November last year. Find out what we did there and what we took away for our company and our customers in this blog post!

On a rather mild Sunday for the time of year, we met on the first day of our coworking to embark on a winter hike together – the whole retreat lasted three days and two nights. The aim of this event? To get a breath of fresh (mountain) air, get creative across teams and give employees the opportunity to work together on exciting projects in a relaxed atmosphere outside the usual office space. Spoiler alert: the employees were very satisfied and had nothing but praise for the retreat and all the activities. 🤩

Using Git to Release and Run Your Web App on Deploio

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 08:29:57 +0000

Web development has evolved significantly, with numerous tools and frameworks streamlining the coding process. However, building and deploying web applications has become increasingly complex, often involving a variety of configurations. Seemingly gone are the days of quick deployments with scp or rsync pointing to dedicated or shared hosting servers.

At the centre of all this progress is Git, which has become the industry standard for version control, code management and collaboration. Git has also become the foundation of modern software release lifecycles. This is where Deploio comes in, providing the missing piece to streamline the release process from development to deployment to operating in production.

What Does … a Head of Marketing & Communications Do at Nine?

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 08:15:08 +0000

Every company wants its products and services to be seen. This requires a marketing professional who is familiar with social media, content, ads, newsletters and events and who can generate attention and traffic. Find out what Raphi’s everyday life as Head of Marketing & Communications looks like at Nine in our interview with him. ⬇️

Elena: Hello Raphi, thank you for taking the time and talking to me! Raphi: You’re very welcome – I’m looking forward to your questions.

No More IP Limitations With Static Egress

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 06:29:37 +0000

In today’s rapidly evolving tech landscape, modern systems like Kubernetes are often seen as the cutting edge of infrastructure and application management. However, even in this world of containerization and dynamic scaling, there are moments when these advanced technologies need to interface with more traditional systems and practices.

One such area is the need for predictable network connectivity, especially when dealing with legacy firewalls and external services that require traffic to originate from a specific IP address. As we face these requirements multiple times at Nine, we had to come up with a solution. Let’s have a closer look into our new static egress feature.

Why We Added Dockerfile Support to Deploio

Tue, 08 Oct 2024 08:46:01 +0000

Introduction

At Nine, we’ve been hard at work refining Deploio, our platform for deploying applications with ease. If you’ve been following our journey, you already know about the significant advancements we’ve made. If you’re new, I recommend reading our previous blog post or having a look at our docs, where we introduced Deploio and explained its core functionality.

What Does … a Head of Finance & Controlling Do at Nine?

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 04:49:11 +0000

Every company needs someone with a flair for numbers. An expert who has debtors and creditors under control and works closely with the other teams. Find out what Daniela’s everyday life as Head of Finance – including her additional role as co-responsible for ISO audits – looks like at Nine in our interview with her. ⬇️

Elena: Hello Daniela, thank you for taking the time and talking to me! Daniela: Hi Elena, of course, nice to see you!

On-Demand Databases Out of Beta: What You Need to Know

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 06:36:47 +0000

Our on-demand MySQL and PostgreSQL databases are now available for your production workloads.

Let’s take a look at what they offer, how to use them, and how they differ from the Managed Server product.

Pricing

Billing is automated based on the resources used. For pricing details, use our Price Calculator.

Looking Back on Our TechTalkThursday #20

Tue, 23 Jul 2024 08:26:06 +0000

Our TechTalkThursday #20 took place on the 2nd of May 2024 at 18:00. We were happy to welcome two external speakers and one 9er who gave a speech. There were around 30 people attending the event, many of them Nine employees, but also some speakers’ guests and external attendees interested in the subjects of centralised search engines, retrieval augmented generation and AI.

Apart from the fact that we celebrated a small anniversary – the 20th event of our TechTalkThursday series – we were also very proud to show off our very own beer, «Deploibroi». This beer was created in partnership with Renuo AG, our deplo.io partner, and Braugenossenschaft Gsöff in Zurich. The beer (and the free snacks) were very well received by everyone.

vCluster: How Is It Used and a Comparison to NKE

Wed, 17 Jul 2024 08:09:19 +0000

What Is vCluster?

A virtual cluster is a fully working Kubernetes cluster that runs on top of another Kubernetes cluster. It is focused solely on core components, comprising the API server, controller manager and a flexible storage backend. By default, vCluster utilises Embedded SQLite for storage, thereby ensuring simplicity and efficiency. However, users have the freedom to opt for alternative options such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB or etcd, depending on their specific requirements. Additionally, vCluster offers the flexibility of including a Scheduler.

Search Engines: Comparing Solr, Elasticsearch and OpenSearch

Tue, 28 May 2024 12:23:47 +0000

In today’s web applications, search functions are omnipresent. Searching for product titles or within a product description is a necessity for e-commerce, but the search isn’t limited to web applications. Different use cases lead to different requirements. Luckily, the open-source world provides a number of modern search engines to fit these requirements.

But which search engine is the right fit for your use case? This article outlines three possible options, two of which are available as a Managed Service at Nine: Apache Solr, Elasticsearch (which is not available as a Managed Service at Nine), and OpenSearch.

v1 to v2: Nine S3 Migration – Why, What, How, and Whether It Was Worth It

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 09:37:21 +0000

As you may have noticed, our v1 S3 product has officially been deprecated, and the migration to v2 is now live. In this blog post, we’ll delve into the reasons behind Nine’s decision to make this transition, how we pulled it off, and most importantly, whether it was worth the effort. So grab a coffee, get comfortable, and let’s dive into the details of this migration journey.

Why

Since its introduction on Nine’s self-service platform in mid-2021, the v1 S3 product has been plagued with challenges, and the ride has not exactly been smooth.

Attacks via HTTP and How to Protect Yourself against Them

Thu, 18 Apr 2024 12:45:46 +0000

What is HTTP?

HTTP, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, is the ’language’ that your web browser and websites speak to each other when you use the internet. It is mainly used to load web pages from the internet into a web browser.

What Does … an IT Service Desk Supporter Do at Nine?

Thu, 28 Mar 2024 07:31:19 +0000

No company can run efficiently without customer support. This is no different at Nine: every day, we receive numerous exciting inquiries that are answered by our Customer Service Desk, or prepared and handed on to our engineering team for clarification. Some of these inquiries are very time-critical and technically extremely demanding, but we always want to offer our customers the best possible service – and solution.

Read our interview with Sophie Kwass, one of our IT Service Desk Supporters, to find out how she masters her complex day-to-day work at Nine while expanding her technical skills on a daily basis.

The Choice Between Block, File and Object Storage

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 10:27:00 +0000

When talking to people about migrating their applications to Kubernetes, there are often questions about storage:

Will the data remain in Switzerland? (data locality)
Is the data encrypted at rest?
Is there any in-transit encryption?
Would it be possible to provide ‘insert big number here’ of storage space?

One thing that is often overlooked is how to access and store data in a multi-node Kubernetes cluster and which infrastructure will be needed for this. As we have several options, I’d like to shed some light on this topic and explain the differences.

Elevate Your App Development with Deploio

Mon, 30 Oct 2023 10:26:00 +0000

Today we’re lifting the curtains and are thrilled to present: Deploio, our Swiss-made, next-gen app engine, designed to simplify your software deployment. We want to get right to it and tell you a little about its core features:

👉 Seamless Deployment: Deploio simplifies your app deployment and management, allowing you to focus on innovation for your core business. Your code, our commitment – let us handle the intricacies. Discover all about Deploio now.

Relaunch of docs.nine.ch with Docusaurus on Deploio!

Thu, 21 Sep 2023 10:26:00 +0000

Our previous support page had lost its luster over the years. Originally developed in-house using Ruby on Rails, it initially provided an efficient way to create and edit articles directly on the website using Markdown. However, as time went on, the management of the page became increasingly challenging, and the lack of version control became a significant limitation. This led to the desire within our team to have a support page that allowed Markdown editing via Git.

New Data Protection Act in Switzerland: An overview of important changes at Nine

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 10:25:00 +0000

The new federal Act on Data Protection (nFADP) will take effect in Switzerland from 1 September 2023. This update involves changes affecting both companies and individuals. In view of these innovations, we have adapted our legal documents to meet the new provisions.

1. Automatic inclusion of the Data Processing Agreement (DPA) in our General Terms and Conditions (GTC)

One change concerns our Data Processing Agreement (DPA), which is now automatically included in our General Terms and Conditions (GTC). Previously, customers had to sign separate DPA agreements to ensure their data was processed in accordance with legal requirements. With the update of our General Terms and Conditions (GTC), this need no longer applies. This means that the Data Processing Agreement (DPA) now applies to all customers by default. You don’t need to do anything. Individual, already existing DPAs, ADVs or AVVs remain valid.

vcluster: A virtual Kubernetes Cluster

Wed, 24 May 2023 10:24:00 +0000

As more developers get familiar with deploying to Kubernetes, the need for better isolation between tenants becomes more important. Is it enough to just have access to a namespace in a cluster? I would argue for most use-cases to deploy your production apps, yes. But if you want dynamic test environments or to schedule your GitLab builds on a certain set of nodes, it can quickly get quite complex to safely set this up on the same cluster as your production apps. Using a full seperate cluster for that is possible but it’s slow to setup and it’s usually quite expensive if you use a fully managed cluster.

Unlocking New Possibilities with the Nine Internet Solutions API

Mon, 08 May 2023 10:23:00 +0000

Modernise your web services with our new API and CLI tools.

At Nine, we’re always looking for innovative ways to improve and expand our services to better serve our customer base. As part of our ongoing mission to modernise our offerings and make our services applicable to the widest range of workflows, we’re excited to announce the launch of our new API and accompanying CLI tool, nctl.

Introducing the Nine Self-Service API

Mon, 08 May 2023 10:22:00 +0000

As we launch our API we want to give some technical insights on how we got here and what can be achieved with it.

Over the last two years we have been reworking on how we provision new infrastructure at Nine. The main goals for this were:

fully automated to allow customers to self-service nine’s products and services.
create a standard approach that can be used in all internal teams

Nine Managed Search with OpenSearch and Solr

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 10:21:00 +0000

Elasticsearch/OpenSearch and Solr are among the most popular and powerful open source search servers. The projects are based on Apache Lucene, a programme library which indexes information in a flexible manner and can provide results for even complex searches in a short time.

With OpenSearch and Solr, we are happy to add two new products from the realm of search servers to our managed services portfolio. OpenSearch replaces Elasticsearch, which we can unfortunately no longer offer as a managed service due to changing licence stipulations.

Growing pains: how can digital agencies scale more effectively and efficiently?

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 10:21:00 +0000

Three growth challenges digital agencies face as they scale, and how to overcome them

Digital agencies have built their business on repeatable, replicable products and services for multiple customers with very similar projects and workflows. Many reach a point where they need to look at how to scale their product, or service, if they want to maintain business growth.

From building websites to providing SaaS products – as the business becomes more successful, developers will find themselves having to replicate essential tasks at scale to simultaneously handle a larger number of projects. One issue they need to address is how they deliver what customers want without creating inefficiencies for themselves. For example:

Why build an in-house Kubernetes platform?

Wed, 20 Jul 2022 10:20:00 +0000

Having the reliability and mature APIs of global-scale cloud providers offers the possibility of a massive productivity increase over managing low-level infrastructure yourself. We have directly benefited from this at Nine with our first Kubernetes product, managed Google Kubernetes Engine, and we have no plans to stop working in the cloud or offering our Kubernetes stack there. So in an age of GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine), AKS (Azure Kubernetes service) and EKS (Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service) it might seem strange that a managed service provider, well accustomed to working in the cloud, would invest significant time and effort into making their own in-house Kubernetes offering, especially considering the technical complexity of such an undertaking. But since the Platform Team at Nine has spent the last two years doing just that we thought it would be interesting to discuss why and where we go from here.

What is self-service in cloud management?

Tue, 10 May 2022 10:17:00 +0000

Self-service has become ubiquitous beyond the IT sector. Nevertheless, self-service cannot solve every problem. What do customers really want? This post outlines the advantages and disadvantages of self-service in cloud management.

What is self-service in cloud management?

Self-service is more than a simple do-it-yourself approach: the word denotes that something has been automated. The idea behind this is to make processes more efficient and to enable easier access to low-level services. In IT, this is no longer surprising – whether in IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) or SaaS (Software as a Service), self-service has become the standard. With cloud self-services, customers can book servers and storage space themselves, or start applications through a web-based portal.

Cloudflare: Protecting Apfelkiste.ch from DDoS Attacks

Thu, 28 Oct 2021 10:17:00 +0000

apfelkiste.ch is one of Switzerland’s biggest online shops. In 2020, it saw a turnover of 60 m Swiss Francs.

From the start, the company’s enormous growth made it clear that apfelkiste.ch would become the target of DDoS attacks. Thus, the company worked with Nine and Cloudflare to establish a solution early on. This solution is not only resistant to DDoS attacks, but also offers many other advantages by providing less complexity and stronger performance.

DevOps: What you should know about DevOps and the use of the DevOps concept

Mon, 29 Mar 2021 10:16:00 +0000

When development and operations are in tension, separate teams, each with their own self-image and different principles, concepts and tools, become a major challenge, and not just in the IT sector. Inevitably, conflicts or problems arise that stand in the way of rapid, agile development and deployment of new applications or software. With DevOps, companies can solve this dilemma and bring development and operations closer together. Processes are accelerated without the quality of work suffering.

Can't I just go to the cloud?

Fri, 04 Dec 2020 10:13:00 +0000

The biggest cloud migration challenges in 2021

One thing that we often hear at nine, being a Managed Service Provider is “Why are you needed? Why don’t we go directly to the cloud ourselves?” Although it’s not in doubt that with the easy to use GUI’s and extensive service offerings of cloud providers doing everything yourself appears to be a tempting proposal, but unfortunately there are a number of pitfalls to avoid and this is where working with an Managed Service Provider could help you. My colleague Peter has already written about this from a more general perspective and I would urge you to begin with his excellent overview. The aim of this article is to talk a little more in detail about technical challenges that you may face and how an Managed Service Provider can support you.

Looking Back on our TechTalkThursday #14

Wed, 02 Dec 2020 10:12:00 +0000

Our TechTalkThursday #14 took place on the 26th of November 2020 at 18:00. Due to local restrictions, we were not able to host a lot of guests, we therefore had only one personal guest of the first speaker, Joseph Pelrine, onsite. We had 130 registrations for the event and the YouTube stream peaked to 45 concurrent users. That’s more than 2x the viewers we had at the last TechTalkThursday! Thanks to everyone for your time!

Review of our Google Cloud Zürich Meetup #6

Fri, 20 Nov 2020 10:09:00 +0000

The Google Cloud Meetup #6 took place on November 10, 2020 in Zürich City in the cafeteria of nine. Due to local restrictions, we were not allowed to have guests in the cafeteria, therefore all participants were online on YouTube. Thanks to Google who would have sponsored pizza and beer!

Thomas Hug, Founder of nine introduces the speakers Matthias Isler, CTO of GetYourLawyer AG and Jonas Felix, Founder of Letsboot.com.

Ubuntu Focal Benefits

Thu, 05 Nov 2020 10:06:00 +0000

Announcing: The newest Ubuntu distribution-release is now available for our “Managed Servers”.

New Ubuntu Version 20.04 LTS

On our “managed” systems we use Ubuntu Linux long term support version (LTS), in order to provide a long support cycle and uniform systems over many years.

Looking Back on our TechTalkThursday #13

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 10:05:00 +0000

Our TechTalkThursday took place on the 1st of October at 18:00. We had with only 15 participants onsite around 1/3 of a Pre-Corona Meetup and it was the first time we streamed live on YouTube (original link, uncut). We had a peak of 18 simultaneous participants watching our stream. Room to improve! Subscribe to our YouTube Channel to get notifications for new videos and live streams of our events!

Looking Back on our TechTalkThursdays #11 and #12

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 10:03:00 +0000

Besides our normal TechTalkThursdays in the evening, we tried new times during lunch and at 08:00 in the morning. Neither of them proved to be better than in the evening as we didn’t have the same amount of participants.

We use this article to summarize the topics of Demian Thoma and Daniel Lorch.

How a Titan empowers our Cloud Monitoring Infrastructure

Nine is hosting and managing thousands of servers for its customers. They recently moved to a new monitoring solution based on the open-source tools around Prometheus. Nine’s Demian Thoma talks about how nine implemented its new monitoring solution and how it gave them more insight into their infrastructure.

Video Interview between Nine Employees Benjamin Kuster and Isabella Mysicka

Mon, 07 Sep 2020 10:02:00 +0000

Benjamin Kuster, Sales Development Executive at nine who reduced his work quota to 20% to found a startup, was interviewed by Isabella Mysicka, Head of Communication & Marketing and Member of the Executive Board.

How long have you worked for nine? What were your main projects or roles at nine?

I’ve worked at nine for more than 5 years now and it has been an interesting, and insightful journey. I started back in April 2015 as a Sales Development Executive and later took the main responsibility for working with new potential customers. There is a lot of variety working with nine customers since they range from startups to big banks and everything in between. Learning about the business and infrastructure needs of different use cases, and transforming it into a solution has provided me with intangible experience.

How do I select a suitable Managed Service Provider?

Fri, 04 Sep 2020 09:57:00 +0000

Managed Service Providers are indispensable service providers and partners for a large number of companies of different sizes. They deal with various issues relating to the provision and operation of IT infrastructure, applications, or cloud services. External service providers relieve their customers of many of the burdens of IT operations and management and ensure that the companies can concentrate fully on their core value creation. Finding and selecting the right Managed Service Provider is no easy task and in Switzerland, numerous providers with different service portfolios are trying to win the attention of their customers.

Review of our Google Cloud Zürich Meetup #5

Tue, 01 Sep 2020 09:56:00 +0000

The Google Cloud Meetup #5 took place on 25 August 2020 in Zürich City in the cafeteria of nine. Since the beginning of the year, we have been recording all our Meetups and publishing them on our YouTube Channel. Corona made it necessary to adapt Meetups and hold them online. Starting with this Meetup, we are combining the online experience (via Google Meet) together with the benefits of on-site events such as networking and having pizza and beer together! Thanks to Google for sponsoring pizza and beer!

Container Orchestration: What is container orchestration and what can it be used for?

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 09:53:00 +0000

Virtualization, containers and cloud computing have fundamentally changed the development and operation of modern applications. However, if you have to manage and provide a large number of containers, there is no way around container orchestration, because countless processes have to be managed simultaneously and in a resource-optimized manner. Tools such as the open source-based Kubernetes provide powerful solutions for orchestrating a container-based environment.

In the following article, we explain what container orchestration is, what it is used for, and how it works. We go into detail about Container Orchestration with Kubernetes and introduce the nine Managed Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Some use cases will conclude by illustrating the usefulness of container orchestration.

What is the Public Cloud and what are typical use cases?

Mon, 20 Jul 2020 09:43:00 +0000

Cloud computing has been established for a long time. The advantages over the classic supply of IT services in the own data center are becoming increasingly dominant. The question for companies is therefore not whether they should use cloud computing, but what type of cloud model or which provider they choose.

The public cloud is very attractive for companies because of its direct availability. A public cloud is an IT service delivered by a provider via the public Internet. Users do not need to install or operate their own hardware. They share the public cloud provider’s infrastructure with other companies. However, data and applications are usually completely separated from each other.

Let’s have some fun with Containers on nine Managed Servers

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 09:42:00 +0000

We quite often receive requests like:

“Do you support Docker?”
“How can we run Docker on our Managed Server?”
“Do you offer Managed Docker?”

These requests kept growing, and unfortunately, we always had to respond:

“No, sorry! It’s not possible at the moment because Docker needs to be run as root. With such a service running as root, we would not be able to maintain our security standards. Containers are only possible on a nine Managed Google Kubernetes Cluster.”

Prometheus Textfile Collectors

Wed, 24 Jun 2020 07:46:00 +0000

After having previously introduced our new monitoring system Prometheus in this blog, which replaced our legacy Nagios installation, I would like to dive a bit deeper into the technical details of our implementation in this article. First, I would like to explain the different sources for Prometheus metrics and specifically the “Node Textfile Collector” as a flexible solution for creating simple metrics.

Then, using a practical example I will show how an existing Nagios NRPE script can be modified so that it can be used to generate Prometheus metrics.

The Road to the Cloud - What is Private Cloud?

Thu, 11 Jun 2020 07:41:00 +0000

Clouds are servers, or networks of servers, on which corporate applications or services are provided over the internet. Private cloud companies usually take care of infrastructure, server space, security, and application management themselves.

In a public cloud, companies are provided with a predefined selection of services via their data center and are not responsible for any of the management of their cloud hosting solution. The data is stored in the provider’s data center and the provider is responsible for the management and maintenance of the data center.

Looking Back on our TechTalkThursday #10

Tue, 09 Jun 2020 07:37:00 +0000

Our TechTalkThursday took place on the 4th of June at 18:00. As Corona is not yet over and since we have already had good experiences with online events like Google Cloud Meetup, we took it in an optimistic way! 35 people (peak) found their way to the Google Meet conference!

Thomas Hug, CEO of nine introduces the two speakers Pablo Vergés of Coders Only and Oliver Graf of Nutanix.

Gitception: Learning Git by putting Git in Git by Pablo Vergés (Coders Only)

Gitception is the idea of putting your Git repository in a Git repository to see what Git does when Git is used. It is a different approach to learn Git. Git is not a tool that just works. Most users memorized a list of commands to sync up but don’t know what happens. It may throw errors at some point or you might get lost with branches. Therefore it certainly helps to understand how it works and that, for example branches are no magic, delete a branch is not dangerous and why creating branches is so fast. To see the internals of Git helps you learn the concepts behind and can create aha-moments because if you are in a situation that doesn’t follow the happy path you would have expected, you will be able to understand what is happening and why.

Review of our Google Cloud Zürich Meetup #4

Tue, 26 May 2020 07:34:00 +0000

The Google Cloud Meetup #4 took place on 19 May 2020 for the first time on Google Meet. In Switzerland, it is currently still not allowed to meet with more than 5 people. Even though we couldn’t offer Pizza and Beer, we were able to have 40 people listening to our two topics.

Thomas Hug, CEO of nine introduces the speakers Jakob Ehrl of Google Cloud and Cyrill Troxler & Sebastian Nickel of Nine Internet Solutions AG.

Processing authoritative requests

Wed, 20 May 2020 12:28:00 +0000

Processing authoritative requests

As every now and then we receive requests by authorities to provide information on their investigation I want to shed some light on how we process such requests, what that means for us and especially what that means for our customers and why they can rest assured that we still take their privacy seriously. That is mostly Police but through different channels, either directly or through the based on the “EJPD”.