Blog - How we made EU Cloud happen

[ivanagas]

Strapline

Explain the idea in a sentence or two

As promotion for EU Cloud, give behind the scenes on how we made EU Cloud Happen

Why should we do it?

How it will it be useful or interesting for readers/viewers

Targets engineers with insights into our work on infrastructure, what it takes to roll out a big, new hosting product.

Outline

Bullet point outline of structure / questions / topics to be covered

• Why do we need EU Cloud
  • Lots of people self-host for compliance, often in the EU
  • Cloud provides many benefits for ease of use, and providing an EU hosting option will open this to more users.
  • Customer requests
• Picking the region
  • In AWS: https://posthog.slack.com/archives/C03NFTN184T/p1657097392574579
  • Domain name https://posthog.slack.com/archives/C03NFTN184T/p1660818695226969
    • Future proofing other countries (using subdomain).
• Provisioning key infrastructure
  • Because PostHog is set up to be self-hosted, many of the processes just required setting up the key infrastructure for EU Cloud hosting (but we’d manage it).
    • “Spinning up PostHog Cloud EU feels (at least to me) a bit like playing lego. It’s incredibly satisfying to see the effort we put in the last months to designing and building those pieces is finally paying off” - Guido: https://posthog.slack.com/archives/C03NFTN184T/p1662468393313489
  • EU AWS
  • Slightly changing some infrastructure for future proofing (Heroku to RDS): https://posthog.slack.com/archives/C03NFTN184T/p1661503713160489
  • Splitting prod pipeline
  • ClickHouse cluster, Redis, MSK Connect (Kafka), and much more, tracked here: https://github.com/orgs/PostHog/projects/66/views/1
  • Roll out status: https://posthog.slack.com/archives/C03NFTN184T/p1661506847277179
• Challenges?
  • Separating from US Cloud, ensuring changes don’t break both
  • CloudFront certificates: https://posthog.slack.com/archives/C03NFTN184T/p1662470094630329
  • Amazon SES approval: https://posthog.slack.com/archives/C03NFTN184T/p1663772909003369?thread_ts=1663748587.214899&cid=C03NFTN184T
  • Some ClickHouse config
• Getting signups
  • Landing page
  • Customer success
  • Ensuring we can handle customers moving over
    • Communicating about what scale we can handle initially
  • Frontend changes (sign up)
• Testing
  • Speed, it’s a lot faster for EU: https://posthog.slack.com/archives/C03NFTN184T/p1663251284737139
  • Code tests, all of the testing carries over from US Cloud
  • Usage test, internally, slow roll out in beta
• Marketing
  • https://posthog.slack.com/archives/C03NFTN184T/p1663339694355169
  • Landing pages, blogs, tutorials
• Launch
  • You can see everything here
  • Do you have strong opinions about what region we should host in the future? We’d love to hear from you.

[charlescook-ph]

Yeah this is a cool idea! I know it's quite a specific audience, but I think this could land really nicely with the YC crowd in particular - basically US companies who spun up a US cloud quickly and now realise they also need to be in the EU.