Around the end of last year, I had a little play around with a new Infrastructure as a Service beta from Brightbox, a UK based Ruby on Rails specialist host. Fast-forward a year, and the Brightbox Cloud is now running as a commercial service with all sorts of useful features like IP addresses you can map to a different server immediately, load balancers, and the ability to easily load your own machine images instead of run off a prebuilt one.

Now they’re actually taken things a step further than Amazon in the field of network security, launching their Cloud Firewall service. This policy driven service lets you control network traffic to and from your servers, and works on both IPv4 and IPv6.

You could definitely do this using iptables running on each Linux host (which is what I’ve done up to now), but bringing this service up to the IaaS management layer is a great step, and makes it much less likely that you’ll end up forgetting 1 host in your deployment, leaving a vulnerable spot in your infrastructure. Plus, who likes managing IPTables anyway?

I don’t know what else Brightbox are working on, but it definitely looks like they are building a cloud service that isn’t willing to play second fiddle to the US giants of Amazon and Rackspace, and are definitely worth keeping an eye on.