Changelog #007

👋 Without further ado, let's get to the news.

Major updates

Here's a list of the latest major updates:

• You spoke, and we listened: We have a new pricing model! Still extremely competitive (if not the most competitive in the market), but now dramatically simpler to understand. Read below for more.

• Our GitHub Runners are now more robust, and more understandable. We've refreshed our UI, and to help navigate GitHub availability, you can also quickly figure out whether we're seeing GitHub problems.

• Simpler previews: you can now create ingresses with names of your choice. This simplifies embedding Namespace in your automation. Try the new nsc expose container --name flag to expose a named container port.

• Previews, now with Kubernetes: Beyond only containers, you can now also expose Kubernetes LoadBalancer services using Namespace's ingress (and with names too). Check it out by running nsc expose kubernetes.

• We've added experimental TLS passthrough: test our arbitrary services — including your own Kubernetes distributions using TLS passthrough. Sneak peak of starting your own k3s in Namespace.

• Same features, but better:

  • Don't need Kubernetes? No worries, create an environment using nsc create --bare. It's also faster to boot up.
  • Asynchronous errors are surfaced to users: such as, if container creation fails during image pulling, these are reported in web UI.
  • Builders and ephemeral instances are now shipped with configured Docker registry mirrors: resulting in faster fetching speeds and less throttling for you.
  • Instances disk size now scales with instance shape: 32 GB + (compute unit count) x 8 GB where a compute unit is 1 vCPU and 2 GB RAM.

Coming Up

• We're bringing our ephemeral instances to Buildkite: Buildkite is a fantastic CI tool where you can run pipelines on any infrastructure. So we decided to build Namespace support to run ephemeral and isolated Buildkite Agents on our cloud. It's looking good! Reach out to us if you'd like early access.

• Hello US: we are excited to open of our new region in US South! You can now run any Namespace product in the US. Contact us to try it out.

• Namespace Compute API beta: our users wanted to power their products with Namespace's infrastructure, and we delivered! You will be able to call our Compute Service API to create ephemeral instances, spin up previews and run containers programmatically.

Community

It is just awesome to see our community growing and attracting more interest. There are new updates from the community.

• CRN has named Namespace among the 10 hottest Kubernetes startups in 2023! This news struck us by surprise, and we are humbled by this recognition.

• Namespace powers Cachix's ARM64 builds. We're secret Nix fanpeople here at Namespace Labs, so we take all the opportunities we can to contribute back to the community!

• Namespace @ Unpacked. We are excited to have joined Cloudsmith and other great companies at the virtual conference Unpacked!

• Namespace went to GopherCon EU 🇩🇪. We love Go! So we were thrilled to sponsor GopherCon EU 2023! A few of us took a short trip to Berlin to talk to developers and see how Namespace can support the Go community.

New Pricing

One of our core values is "no gimmicks". And in the process of offering what we felt was great pricing to users, we introduced something a bit different in our pricing: concurrent capacity that scales with seats.

On paper, when you got to do the math, it turned out to be a good deal to users.

But it's complexity led to it feeling like .. a gimmick. So we wanted to do better.

At namespace.so/pricing you can check out where we landed.

A more familiar "pay as you go" model that helps teams try out the product with little commitment. And a pair of plans that bundle usage into a very competitive price-point.

Why plans?

Namespace works with different bare metal providers to bring you the best performance at the best price point.

Most bare metal providers rent machines on a month, yearly, and sometimes even multi-year contracts, which require us to do a large upfront investment.

We're happy to do that investment, and offer our services metered by the minute.

But when you subscribe to a plan, you help us do better capacity planning, and those resulting savings are then reflected back to you: you get a 33% discount.

Although the early feedback we're getting on this new model is positive, we're always happy to work with you on a plan that best fits your needs. Always feel free to reach out.

Working with you

June was a good month for us.

Our number of users increased, we strenghted our product, and we have many interesting integrations conversations going on.

It's been rewarding to see how our products solve real-world problems and help teams go faster.

Most of our users have a direct channel to us: support is our top-most priority.

Come and talk with us, we're here to help.