Skip Navigation

Engineering Blog

Posts Tagged ‘cloud’

Another exciting year

Saturday, December 17th, 2011

From: Adam C. Greenfield (Senior Product Manager)

Every year around this time I find myself reflecting on what has going on this year and I wanted to share some of my thoughts. As always, technology has continued to evolve rapidly in some very exciting ways. Very importantly to me, I see so many people using this technology to solve business problems in ways we couldn’t have imagined 12 months ago.

While the term “cloud” has been diluted to include everything from scalable infrastructure services to on-line photo editing many businesses took steps to leverage these technologies to provide value to their organizations and end users. Every day businesses find the balance between delivering on their core values and using innovative technology and services to do so more efficiently than ever before.

One of our big focuses for this year has been delivering highly resilient services to keep our customers businesses running smoothly. Availability continues to be a top focus and many of our behind the scenes efforts (in both process and technology) have kept that in the front of our minds. This year brought our Critical Availability Service to the forefront offering expertise, best practices, and advice to customers looking to protect their systems as well as a world class Service Level Agreement protecting your application end to end.

This year we started down another related path as well. We invested heavily in providing new recovery services that extended application availability improvements beyond single facilities. We’ve worked in close co-operation with our key technology partners to build a menu of services to provide application redundancy between physical locations. Today it is easier than ever for a Hosting.com customer to have their application protected and running in two of our facilities thousands of miles apart.

Another exciting addition to our services is that we have several new offerings targeted at protecting workload from outside production sites to our facilities. New technology has made it possible to maintain levels of protection that had previously only been realistic for the very largest organizations.

As I look to the next year, we are looking at making substantial investments in our existing platforms. Refining, improving, and responding to the feedback we get from our customers to make our services even better. I’ll close by saying thank you to our customers; we appreciate the trust you place in us to keep your critical applications running every day. We also appreciate the feedback you provide and look forward to a very exciting 2012!

Upcoming Events: Cloud Solutions Roadshow (Chicago and Atlanta)

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

From: Adam C. Greenfield, User Experience Manager

I wanted to make a quick post regarding some upcoming events we will be having in concert with VMware. Folks that should consider coming out include:

  • Any VMware/Hosting.com clients
  • VMware clients interested in extending/augmenting their datacenter to a service provider’s cloud for disaster recovery, scalability and test/dev environments
  • VMware partners that want more information on how they can/should connect with vCloud service providers
  • Those considering virtualizing their data center
  • Companies who want/need a general understanding of cloud
  • Those approaching a server or infrastructure refresh or consolidation. Learn how Redwood might impact your business
  • Companies that want to reduce server capital expenses and management costs

On July 20th, we will be hosting an event in the Atlanta area with lunch provided at the Ravinia Club and Spa.

On July 22nd, I will be speaking in Chicago at Lloyd’s and we will also have free breakfast for everyone getting up early with us.

We would love to have you come out and join us if you are in either area. Obviously, I’m partial to our Chicago event and would love to see as many folks as possible (we all know breakfast is the most important meal of the day) – but I’m sure Jim will make a great presentation (over an equally delicious free lunch) in Atlanta.

Hope to see you there!

New Cloud Enterprise Ordering

Saturday, May 8th, 2010

From: Adam C. Greenfield, User Experience Manager

This has been a crazy week at Hosting.com. We spent the early part of the week getting everything sorted out with the Newark cloud after a storage issue and things are moving as quickly as ever on the engineering side of the house. I’m pretty excited that we are starting to get the first modules for our portal developed by our groups internally and by our partners. The portal team has started the process of integrating these modules while we address a few bugs that have been reported by our staff and customer. The other major initiative underway is getting a private version of our Cloud Enterprise offering out the door. It looks like the settled product name will be Cloud Private and the idea is that you will have all the same functionality in the portal as a Cloud Enterprise customer – but have your resources provisioned on dedicated hardware nodes that only contain your Virtual Machines.

A few weeks ago now, I recorded a Customer Portal demo to give everyone a feeling for the Cloud functionality in our portal today. I turned it over to marketing and product management but I imagine they are still working it through their internal processes, so I wanted to get it out there in front of everyone here first.

I have some higher res versions that hopefully they’ll use when we get this formally posted to our site. As always – feedback welcome and I love hearing from our customers or prospective customers.

What would you like to see?

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

From: Adam C. Greenfield, User Experience Manager

The Portal team has been busy preparing for a release, originally scheduled for yesterday (Monday), however due to some finishing touches we wanted to include (and a last minute bug fix) it will finally launch tomorrow morning (Wednesday).

One of the things we discussed today was trying to release more frequently. When I started my involvement with the Portal effort we set a goal of one release a month. At this point it has been far longer than that and as a result preparing this release has been a much larger task than expected for the team. We have agreed tentatively to try to make one small release every sprint now. Our sprints are two weeks at a time so that would be roughly two releases a month.

This coming week I’m heading out to our corporate headquarters in Denver, CO to do planning with our Product Managers and the Platform Engineering team. Today I had a conversation with one of the Platform Engineers about some of the exciting new functionality we will be launching for our Cloud in the near future. The platform guys and our production support folks have finished most of the backend of these new features – we plan to get them integrated in the portal in short order.

We have a Sprint Planning for our Portal team scheduled on Monday – so if you could add one feature to our Customer Portal today, what would it be? Feel free to answer publically in the comments below or privately by e-mail (my first name at hosting dot com).

VMWare User Group – Philadelphia

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.

Deploying our Customer Portal

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

From: Adam C. Greenfield, User Experience Manager

One of the first tasks I worked on when I recently joined our Software Engineering group was managing the deployment of our new Customer Portal. All of our previous web properties have been deployed using dedicated servers within one of our datacenters.

From a security perspective, we deployed it behind a pair of highly available Juniper SSG-series firewalls. We also leveraged our F5 Big-IP Local Traffic Manager to split load between multiple web servers, allow for future scaling, and ensure a highly available application for our customers.

What we did differently this time around is rather than leveraging dedicated servers as we had in the past, we decided to deploy to multiple virtual machines in our Cloud. This decision was made for several reasons, primarily:

  • Ability to add capacity on demand by adding virtual machines
  • Flexibility to upgrade resources to existing infrastructure without downtime
  • Opportunity to leverage the same firewalls and load balancing available to us with dedicated servers

It also made each of our virtual machines highly available on their own, isolating us further from outage or performance degradation in the event of hardware failure.

We also decided to leverage our EMC Celerra NAS to store file cache and other data shared between the multiple web servers and services servers. This storage is presented to our web servers as a CIFS/Samba share which can be accessed and updated by multiple nodes simultaneously without the need for a more complex clustering solution.

Not only is our new Customer Portal the latest and greatest offering from Hosting.com in the way of customer experience, it is also powered by the same cutting edge infrastructure offered to each and every one of our customers.