Modernise your web services with our new API and CLI tools.
At Nine, we're always looking for innovative ways to improve and expand our services to better serve our customer base. As part of our ongoing mission to modernise our offerings and make our services applicable to the widest range of workflows, we're excited to announce the launch of our new API and accompanying CLI tool, nctl.
Our API allows you to manage your Nine services with ease, while the nctl CLI tool provides a seamless way to interact with the API, streamlining tasks such as logging in or creating service accounts. This allows you a greater level of autonomy over your Nine solutions, and although we're still working to include all of our services in the API, we believe that this is a significant step forward in making our platform more accessible and efficient.
Here's a brief overview of what you can expect from these new features:
- Flexibility and Integration
At Nine, we know that every customer's requirements are unique. By offering an API in addition to our existing web-based interface, we're opening the door for our customers to build custom integrations with their existing systems and tools. With the ability to connect to our services programmatically, businesses can streamline their operations and tailor their workflows to meet their unique requirements. Our API has a full OpenAPI specification, so you can easily integrate it into your own tooling and client if using nctl does not suit your workflow.
- Automation and Efficency
As we strive to modernise our offerings and empower our customers, one of the key benefits of our new API is the ability to adopt DevOps workflows that were previously not possible with Nines’ services. Embracing DevOps practices can help your organisation streamline processes, improve collaboration, and reduce time-to-market. With our API, you can now fully integrate DevOps principles into your projects.
Leveraging our API will enable you to create, update and destroy services in an automated manner as part of your testing or deployment pipelines. This means you can rapidly spin up and tear down environments as needed, without manual intervention. By integrating our API into your continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, you can accelerate your software development lifecycle and ensure that your applications are always up-to-date and reliable. With the API and nctl, it's easier than ever to automate repetitive tasks and processes. Combined with existing Nine features such as autoscaling, KEDA, ArgoCD and Grafana, Nine now offers more tools than ever before to automate every aspect of your application lifecycle.
- Onboarding Made Easy
At Nine, we understand that our customers have diverse needs and preferences when it comes to managing their web services. We believe in providing a range of tools that cater to different workflows, whether you're a developer who prefers a command-line interface and yaml file, or a manager looking for a user-friendly graphical interface. That's why we've developed our new CLI tool, nctl, in conjunction with our existing web interface, Cockpit.
Our nctl CLI tool is designed to make it simple for both new and existing customers to start using our API. With an intuitive command-line interface, you can quickly log in and access the API, making it easier to manage your services and explore the capabilities of our platform. This tool is particularly suited to developers who are comfortable with command-line utilities and prefer to automate tasks through scripts, or integrate with their existing toolchains.
In contrast, Cockpit is our web-based interface that provides a more accessible and visual way to manage your Nine products. It is designed for those who prefer a graphical interface, especially those in management roles or with less technical backgrounds. With Cockpit, you can easily monitor and control your resources, track usage, and configure settings through an intuitive dashboard. If you’re just starting out with using the API directly, it’s also a good way to double-check that any actions performed there had the desired effects on your configuration.
- Service Accounts
As we continue to expand our offerings with the launch of our new API, we recognise the importance of providing our customers with robust security features and granular control over their resources. Following on from our recent introduction of personalised logins, we're excited to introduce service accounts—a powerful tool that enhances the management and security of your Nine services.
Service accounts are designed to help you manage access to your resources and services within our platform more effectively. Here's a brief overview of the benefits service accounts bring to our customers:
- Fine-Grained Access Control
Service accounts allow you to define specific permissions and roles, ensuring that accounts have access only to the resources and actions necessary for their tasks. This approach provides you with granular control over your infrastructure, enabling you to implement the principle of least privilege and to minimise the risk of unauthorised access. - Improved Security
By using service accounts, you can further reduce the need for sharing personal user credentials, such as usernames and passwords, among your team members. As well as each team member having an individual login with Nine, they can generate service accounts which provide unique credentials that can be used to authenticate and interact with our API. This approach helps protect your sensitive information and makes it easier to track and manage access to your resources. - Simplified Auditing and Monitoring
Service accounts make it easier to monitor and audit the actions performed within your infrastructure. Currently, our service accounts only offer the ability to have “admin” or “viewer” roles applied, but we plan to expand this in future with the introduction of “Projects”, which will allow you to scope a service account to a defined subset of your organisation’s resources.
- Ongoing Enhancements and Expansion
As we continue to develop and improve our API, we'll be adding more features and services to enhance your experience. We're committed to delivering a powerful, easy-to-use toolset that will help you modernise your infrastructure and stay competitive in the digital landscape. So expect more of our services to be available via this interface in the coming months.
To help you get started, we've prepared comprehensive documentation that outlines how to use the API and nctl CLI tool. You can find step-by-step guides, detailed explanations of available features, and example code to assist you in integrating our API into your workflow.
If you’re an existing Nine customer, you can already use the API and nctl today by visiting https://github.com/ninech/nctl and following the install instructions for your system. Our full API docs and OpenAPI spec are available at https://docs.nineapis.ch. For a more developer-focused introduction to using our API, you can also check out this blog article from our Platform Tech Lead Cyrill, where he covers topics such as using our API from Terraform.
Next from Nine
But that's not all—we have more exciting news on the horizon. We're always working on new services to make our customers' lives easier, and we're thrilled to give you a sneak peek at what's coming up next. Soon, we will be launching deplo.io, a cutting-edge, no-ops hosting service. This platform will enable you to deploy applications quickly and effortlessly, without the need to manage underlying infrastructure.
Deplo.io is designed to cater to the needs of modern developers, offering a seamless, configuration-based approach to deploying your applications. Deplo.io is committed to being a developer-first experience, meaning you can focus on your applications while we take care of the rest. We can't wait to share more about this game-changing service in the coming weeks. To be one of the first to try it, please visit the website and sign up for more information.
At Nine Internet Solutions, we're committed to providing our customers with the tools they need to succeed in an ever-evolving digital landscape. Our API, nctl, and upcoming services like deplo.io are just the beginning. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to enhance our offerings and empower your business to thrive.
