Announcing Volumes for Cloud Containers

Today, after a few weeks in testing, we’re very happy to announce, and shortly release, Volumes to all Cloud Container customers. Why are we so happy about this? Partly because it’s a great feature, and partly because you have all been asking us nicely to solve two common problems for a while now. Our support team is very much looking forward to being able to say, “Yes, you can do that” to these questions:

• Can I share a directory between multiple containers? For example I want to share images, videos or client uploads.

• Can I give SSH/sFTP access to a specific folder rather than the whole container?

Now we can finally answer those questions without “we’re working on it” or providing complicated workarounds. Instead we can simply say, “Volumes”. 

What are Volumes and how do they work?

The simplest way to think about Volumes is that they are just another folder inside your containers, which can store whatever you like inside of them. The big difference is that we will automatically attach them to as many containers as you specify, but the disk space is only used once. Plus all of those containers can access the files inside the Volume and if needed make them web accessible with some simple symlinks.

If that’s enough for you to want to jump in already, you can head over to the Knowledge Base to learn how to get Volumes up and running.

How does access work?

There’s two ways of accessing a Volume, both with different levels of privileges. Now when creating or modifying an SSH/sFTP User you can specify whether they are a Container & Volumes user or Volumes Only. The names give away quite a bit, but put simply:

• Container & Volume Users – can be assigned access to one or more container, and they will always be able to access any Volumes also attached to those Containers.

• Volumes Only – can be assigned access to one or more Volume, and will only ever be able to access that Volume, never any containers.

This allows you to segment certain users to certain directories, for example to allow a customer to upload PDFs, but not touch any website files.

Can I use Volumes now? And you’re saying they’re free to use?

We’ve already released Volumes to some customers, and over the next few days we’ll be releasing Volumes to all remaining Cloud Container customers. They are available at no extra cost, and are another example of our continued investment and improvement of the Cloud Container platform since it launched in 2016. Just keep in mind you may need some extra disk space if you start storing lots more files!

We hope you enjoy the new Volumes functionality and if you have any questions please get in touch.