Exoscale Hosted Instances

We host sensitive data for various Swiss institutions on a secure cloud service known as Exoscale.

The decision to opt for Exoscale was based on a recommendation from Muséum d’histoire naturelle Geneva. Operating from Switzerland, Exoscale makes sure that the data remains securely within the country’s borders, meeting the strict data residency requirements in place by the Swiss government.

To learn about the backup process we use on Exoscale, see this document.

At the time of writing this (2024-08-14), we manage two compute instances, both in the Geneva zone, both using the ubuntu user as the primary account:

assets-swiss-1

This instance is only running an instance of the web-asset-server locally. The asset server key and other information about the specific configuration is available at /home/ubuntu/web-asset-server/settings.py.

Service Status

You can check the status of the asset server by running the following command:

ubuntu@assets-swiss-1:~/web-asset-server$ systemctl list-units --type=service | grep web-asset-server
  web-asset-server.service                       loaded active running Specify Web Asset Server

Check the Logs

To view the logs for the asset server, use the following command:

ubuntu@assets-swiss-1:~/web-asset-server$ journalctl -u web-asset-server.service

This command will display the logs related to the web-asset-server.service, allowing you to troubleshoot any issues.

Restarting the Service

If you need to restart the asset server, you can do so with the following command:

ubuntu@assets-swiss-1:~/web-asset-server$ sudo systemctl restart web-asset-server.service

After restarting, you may want to check the status again to ensure it is running properly.

sp7cloud-swiss-1

This server hosts docker-compositions specifycloud-style deployments. They are managed in the same manner as the other AWS instances, so no special configuration here.

The docker-compose.yml and spcloudservers.json files are available at /home/ubuntu/docker-compositions/specifycloud.

When changes are made to the spcloudservers.json file, run make as ubuntu to update the appropriate files.