An update has taken a bit with the summer holidays in our rear-view mirror, so let me cut to the chase.

While look at alternative cloud providers, we ran into new issues with the Linode offering. Aside from the slow responses from support, a community of a new client was offline almost for a work day. The manner in which this urgent problem was treated by Linode was disappointing, to say the least, making our decision even simpler. Luckily this client hadn't yet gone live with the community, but the consequence could have been disastrous if this weren't so.

The tests to identify valid cloud hosting partners has led us to AKS or Azure Kubernetes Service by Microsoft. We initially had all hopes vested on Google, but our test to instantiate a simple cluster for our communities was limited by their quotas. A request to lift their quota has not been answered.

In the meantime we were looking at the performance, scalability and services that Microsoft has in that area and weren't disappointed. Getting a quota increase from them took less than half a day and so we are already moving to change our deployments to point to Azure. Our expectation is to finish this and start moving our existing clients there before October 1st.

Once this migration is completed, we will have to confirm the whole interaction from a user perspective with blomstra.net and deployed communities is exactly as envisioned, go over our offering in terms of cost versus turnover. Once that is completed and any customer feedback has been processed we will move forward into the open beta for the remainder of the year.