We are polishing up some great enhancements to GoGrid and the results of our efforts will be live shortly. To that end, please be notified that we are performing Scheduled Maintenance in order to roll out new functionality and features which does require some downtime of the GoGrid Portal. This information has already been delivered to existing GoGrid customers via email and is also available on the GoGrid Status Blog.

Scheduled Maintenance Details

Infrastructure Update:
Tuesday, February 9th, 19:00 – 23:00 PST
(Wednesday, February 10th, 03:00 – 07:00 GMT)

Customer Impact:

The GoGrid “my.GoGrid.com” customer portal and API will be unavailable for up to 4 hours while we upgrade our infrastructure. There will be no impact to existing GoGrid VMs, load balancers or cloud storage during this time.

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Today we sent out the January 2010 GoGrid Customer Update to all GoGrid customers. We wanted to ensure that all people who are interested in GoGrid have access to the latest and greatest information coming from our headquarters so the full newsletter is posted below. If you want to get regular updates similar to this newsletter, I recommend that you subscribe to the GoGrid blog RSS feed, subscribe to blog post via email, follow us on Twitter (@GoGrid) as well as become a GoGrid Facebook Fanpage.

Below is the entire GoGrid Newsletter (January 2010):

Hello Michael,

On behalf of everyone here at GoGrid, I want to wish you a very successful 2010!  We are starting the year off with a bang that includes some exciting new developments that I want to share with you in this edition of the GoGrid Newsletter.  Here are the specific topics:

1. New Features and System Enhancements
2. GoGrid CDN: New Singapore and Paris Points of Presence (POPs)
3. New Partner GSIs
4. Preventative Power Maintenance
5. End-of-Life: CentOS 5.1 w/Apache &  RHEL 5.1 w/Apache operating systems
6. New CentOS 5.3 & RHEL 5.4 base operating systems
7. Two New 3rd Party Services to Monitor your GoGrid Servers
8. Hosting for Haiti

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This week, ChannelWeb/CRN published their editorial teams’ choices for the 100 Coolest Cloud Vendors. The lists will also appear in the next printed issue of CRN. Each of these “coolest” lists are broken down into a few vendor subcategories including:

• Cloud Platform
• Cloud Security
• Cloud Infrastructure
• Cloud Productivity Applications
• Cloud Storage

We are pleased to announce that GoGrid is listed under the “20 Coolest Cloud Platform Vendors“:

The other vendors mentioned include: Amazon EC2, Appistry (a GoGrid partner), AppScale, AT&T, Engine Yard, Enomaly, Flexiscale, GCloud3,  Gizmox, Google, LongJump, Microsoft, OrangeScape, RackSpace, Salesforce.com, Terremark, Ubuntu, VMware and Verizon.

While we typically categorize ourselves as Cloud Infrastructure (along with AWS and Rackspace), we truly appreciate the inclusion in the “Coolest Cloud Platform Vendors”.

Yesterday, CloudKick announced that they have officially come out of beta and is rolling out a freemium model for their server management and monitoring service. With the announcement, CloudKick also officially launched support of the GoGrid Cloud in its management, alerting, graphing and monitoring suite.

CloudKick offers a variety of robust services to help you quickly and easily gain insight into your infrastructure hosted on GoGrid. Some services and features include:

• Monitor critical metrics
• Simple management tools
• Flexible alerting to multiple addresses including SMS
• Visualize performance data
• Multiple users
• Changelog tool
• CloudKick agent

Depending on the plan that you are on (they range from free to $599+ a month), you get a variety of services mentioned above. The difference in plans depend on the number of servers, users, data retention, alerts and the type of support you desire.

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In an effort to be as proactive as possible, GoGrid has officially notified select customers of the removal (End of Life – EoL) of two specific GoGrid images. The users that were notified are ones that are actively using the images. On 2/9/10, GoGrid will be removing the following images from the GoGrid image repository:

• CentOS – CentOS 5.1 (64-bit) w/ Apache 2.2
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux – RHEL 5.1 (64-bit) w/ Apache 2.2

I’m sure that some of you will have questions about this. In anticipation of this, I have compiled some quick Q&A’s:

Question: What does the removal of these images mean?

Answer: Simply that after the removal date, they will no longer appear within the GoGrid Image Selection widget.

Question: I have server(s) deployed that use these images? Will they continue to function?

Answer: Yes, there is no change to how your server(s) will function if they are using one of these EoL-ed images. Just be sure that you keep everything current within those servers.

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As all of you know, a devastating series of earthquakes rocked the Haiti region on January 12th, 2010, crippling the infrastructure, killing thousands and leaving even more people utterly homeless. While relief efforts are currently underway, the recovery and assistance effort is an on-going uphill battle with little or no relief in sight. Countries from around the world have rushed people, medical supplies and other humanitarian aid, but as aftershocks continue (today there was a 6.1 registered aftershock, for example), the fragile and brittle stability is being further shattered.

The bottom line, the Haitian people need assistance of ANY TYPE immediately and in an on-going basis, whether it be in the form of time, money or other types of support. Doing absolutely nothing is the worst thing that you can do. Even if you cannot afford to donate time or money, there are other activities that you can do to assist in the relief efforts (one example is listed later in this post).

The outpouring of relief efforts thus far is impressive, however, as a worldly community living under the same “roof”, we all need to put aside our differences and work together to help the Haitians in their time of need.

Hosting for Haiti Initiative

Officially launching today is an initiative comprised of a group of Hosting Providers who normally compete head-to-head. The initiative brings together several hosting providers including Rackspace, Peer1, GoGrid, The Planet and ServInt, in an effort to create a consolidated and organized front to provide monetary assistance to the Haitian Relief Efforts. HostingForHaiti.com is a site designed to provide support from the hosting industry, because through a unified effort, more gains can be realized.

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There are plenty of services out there that let you monitor your infrastructure and servers performance and uptime. In fact, you would be foolish not to have at least a couple monitoring your site’s URL so that you can be notified when issues do occur. However, there are fewer services that actually let you monitor AND troubleshoot at a much more granular level. Over the past few weeks, I have been testing out once such service called Server Density.

Whether you have 1 server or multiple, Server Density has your monitoring covered with both free and paid for pricing plans (details here). The folks over at Boxed Ice, the makers of Server Density set me up with the premium version of their service so that I could test it out on my personal blog which is running on GoGrid. Before I go into my analysis of the service, here are some of the highlights (pretty much all of which I have tested):

• Monitoring of Core Measurables:
  • CPU Load (included w/ free acct)
  • Memory (included w/ free acct)
  • Processes (included w/ free acct)
  • Disk Usage
  • Network Traffic
  • Apache
  • MySQL
  • Nginx
• Alerting: (more…)

This is truly the power of Social Media and Cloud Computing! For a long time, I have corresponded with Shannon Whitley (founder of ServerExplorer.com) for a variety of reasons including tech, hosting, blogging and social media. (Shannon has helped me personally with some WordPress theme issues on my personal blog.) All of that aside, I watched as Shannon complained about hosting (with other providers) and the lack of control over the hosting environment that many of his other providers were giving him. He had been experimenting with GoGrid for sometime and some of his sites were hosted with us at GoGrid. Well, one thing led to another and after quite a few private Twitter messages, we agreed that something could be done about “hosting for .NET developers” using the GoGrid infrastructure.

What started as an idea over Twitter is now a fully built-out .NET community, all fully developed by Shannon. As he explains it: “Server Explorer is a social network for all of the adventurous people who administer their own web servers.  Everyone is welcome, and people of all skill levels are encouraged to join.  Amateur server admins will feel comfortable learning and asking questions on the site, while professional administrators have an opportunity to share knowledge and market their services.”

So, Shannon leveraged the open GoGrid API to create a fully integrated portal solution where developers can provision pre-defined Windows (.NET) and Linux servers on-the-fly. Behind the scenes, the servers being instantiated are simply private GSIs (GoGrid Server Images) that have been configured. As of the launch, there are several Windows Server 2003 and 2008 images available which are pre-configured with the following items:

• IIS, SMTP, Windows Firewall, and FTP are installed.
• All .NET framework versions are pre-installed with current patches (as of the image date)
• IIS Web Service Extensions are configured to Allow legacy ASP, .NET 1.1 and 2.0.
• PHP is installed and configured for IIS.
• URLRewrite is installed and configured.
• MySQL is installed.
• SQL Server 2008 management tools are installed.
• SQL Server 2008 Express is installed.
• FTP is setup and configured with special permissions by IP address.

When you use a ServerExplorer (GoGrid) image, you save a lot of time by not having to configure these basic .NET items. Also, ServerExplorer is providing a slightly less expensive pricepoint with 0.5 GB servers starting at around $25/month.

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Today, New Relic announced that their RPM product supports GoGrid Cloud Hosting Infrastructure and is available for a limited time with preferential pricing. RPM is an on-demand tool that companies can use to optimize, monitor and troubleshoot their Java, Ruby and JRuby applications within a variety of environments, which now includes the GoGrid cloud.

With New Relic’s RPM running on GoGrid, users can monitor many aspects of a Ruby, Java or JRuby application, detect performance problems and eventually drill down to uncover root causes of any performance issues. RPM also cleanly integrates with other development tools.

There are several RPM Service Plans available for GoGrid customers to choose from including:

• RPM Lite
• RPM Bronze
• RPM Silver
• RPM Gold
• RPM Enterprise

The graphic below clearly depicts the differences between each tier:

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Another GoGrid partner, CohesiveFT, has made 2 Partner GSIs available for GoGrid customers to use. VPN-Cubed is a overlay network which provides control of addressing, protocols, topology and encrypted communications for devices within the public cloud, specifically GoGrid. By utilizing a GoGrid VPN-Cubed server image, enterprise customers are ensured a greater control over their computing infrastructure and security therein.

Their offering, called VPN-Cubed, comes in two free versions currently on GoGrid (with a paid version coming soon):

• VPN-Cubed for GoGrid SSL Free Edition – Users launch one or two VPN-Cubed Manager GSI(s) and “plug” up to 10 server instances into the resulting encrypted network inside of GoGrid. Users can specify subnet address each connected instance and all communication between the connected devices and the Manager is encrypted.
• VPN-Cubed for GoGrid IPsec Free Edition – Users launch a single VPN-Cubed Manger/IPsec Gateway GSI and “plug” up to 5 server instances into the resulting encrypted network inside of GoGrid. In addition to subnet control and communication encryption inside of GoGrid, users can connect the overlay network to their existing in-house infrastructure via a secure IPsec Tunnel. There is support for a wide range of IPsec extranet devices.

These Partner Images are now available within GoGrid:

Through the use of VPN-Cubed, GoGrid users get: (more…)