Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
Hosting.com will be sponsoring a VMWare User Group meeting for people in the Philadephia area near our Newark, Delaware datacenter on March, 4th 2010. The bulk of the meeting will be held at a conference facility nearby and at the end we will be giving a datacenter tour to those interested after the meeting. There will be presentations from Hosting.com, Arraya Solutions, VMWare and ZenOSS.
We invite everyone to register and join us.
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010
From: Adam C. Greenfield, User Experience Manager
As Matt was nice enough to point out it has been a while since I’ve provided you with an update from the Software Engineering crew. One of our major focus items has been getting the new Customer Portal ready to support Cloud Enterprise customers. The team is a few weeks away from being ready to enable management of your Cloud Enterprise resources in the Portal – as well as a few additional gems that our Platform Engineering has cooked up in the mean time.
This is a portal milestone because our Cloud products have become a major area of growth for us and this will get our Cloud customers utilizing the latest and greatest in customer interface we have to offer. We’re pretty excited about this in the engineering group and hope folks will be happy with the results.
We are also working with our operations teams to plan some upgrades to our shared mail platforms and spam filtering offerings. The first phases of these upgrades have already started to roll out and we expect to have them completed for the next month or so. Most of these upgrades are infrastructure so if we it correctly, the only thing directly noticeable by customers will be improved performance for e-mail.
One of the final phases of these improvements will be migration to a new spam-filtering offering. Customers will receive notice specifically when we are further along, we will be migrating from offering Google’s Postini services to offering a new suite of services.
More to come in the near future, I’ll pull together some screenshots for my next post so you can get a feeling for what the future will look like.
Monday, February 15th, 2010
From: Matt Ferrari, Director of Platform Engineering
If you’ve ever had a product (web site) succeed, oftentimes you push the envelope of what your web based application can do within a single application server environment. We’ve had customers that wake up and find themselves on the front page of a web site such as Digg.com and have had their traffic increase by hundreds of percent overnight. When this occurs customers will often add a server (or cloud virtual machine) to their environment and begin to layer on load balancing to their solution.
The downside of that plan is often the amount of time (and in turn money) it takes to move data, reconfigure applications such as IIS or Apache, and check to make sure everything is working as expected on that new instance. One of the enhancements that our engineering group is working on is the ability to safely clone your Cloud Enterprise virtual machine to a second machine, add the new ip address and hostname to that machine, and send you your setup information.
While ‘cloning’ capability is already feasible within Virtual Center, the ability to handle some of our managed software, IP addresses, monitoring, user level access, internal support information, and billing line items automatically is what is being designed and tested currently. There will be some packages, such as control panels, that will not be compatible with cloning, we’re pretty excited about bringing this time saving features to our customer base in the near future.
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010
From: Matt Ferrari, Director of Platform Engineering
Not all of the tools that our Platform Engineering department develops are for our external customers. We’ve got a few different customer types; one of those is our internal customer.
In late 2009 we retired a legacy deployment platform and launched our new deployment portal. The concept behind the new deployment portal was simple; the ability to deploy operating systems, software, managed services, and even networking information via a single pane of glass interface. The delivery was not quite as simple; a web service based application that can be exposed to our end user customer someday that shows the status of each physical or cloud build as it goes through each step of deployment.
We needed deployment portal to be able to provide the ability to redeploy a package that might run into an issue (driver compatibility, resource not available, etc). That wouldn’t be any good if we did not develop a back end that allows for package management of our solutions and maintain them at the individual package level. It was also important to be able to deploy a cloud or physical server solution into any of our managed data centers without having to physically be on site. And many, many more.
All of these features to deliver on one true key item:
- Hand our clients their new solutions with a consistent experience by automating our processes
In 2010 we hope to show you some of what we’ve built on the back end.