The message below was sent to GoGrid customers from our CEO/Co-Founder, John Keagy, and CMO/Co-Founder, David Hecht, regarding the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attack which affected many GoGrid users.

It has been a long couple of days here at GoGrid. We are hearing from many of you that you want more information, more often. Engineers are often working so hard to fix an issue that you they don’t give you enough visibility into what is going on.

In that spirit of improved communication and transparency, I want to continue sending updates via email. You can always see the latest status at http://www.GoGridStatus.com as well.

While some of you have been unscathed by the network attacks and portal issues over the past few days, we know that many of you are frustrated at the downtime and impacts to your Internet infrastructure. We are frustrated as well. We’ve been in the hosting business for over 8 years now, and have generally been able to prevent most incidents from impacting customers as heavily as this attack did.

ONGOING DDoS ATTACK

Our network is currently the target of a large, distributed DDoS attack that began on Monday afternoon.   We took action all day yesterday to mitigate the impact of the attack, and its targets, so that we could restore service to GoGrid customers.  Things were stabilized by 4 PM PDT and most customer servers were back online, although some of you continued to experience intermittent loss in network connectivity.

We had a maintenance window scheduled for 9 PM PDT to do a major expansion of GoGrid’s capacity and roll out some minor feature improvements and bug fixes. Because this maintenance window required the portal being down and support cases would have to be opened by phone, we considered postponing the maintenance to a time when things were calmer.

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It’s important to us to clarify GoGrid’s position with regard to cloud computing standards and the Open Cloud Manifesto (OCM). There has been a fair bit of controversy in the ‘blogosphere’ recently over the OCM, which is to be released on Monday.

In particular, myself and Steve Gillmor (of TechCrunch IT fame among others), had a somewhat heated, but friendly exchange over his scathing assessment of the situation. Steve invited me to a “News Gang” podcast of the Gillmor Gang on Friday, which was posted here. During that live podcast he asked us to clarify GoGrid’s position.

This post is really about making sure everyone is on the same page and understands how GoGrid views the OCM and cloud computing standards in general.

Background
It’s unnecessary to recap everything in detail. I think James Urquhart handled this fairly succinctly. Geva Perry also has a nice summary including a link to the draft document. In a nut:

1. Some folks tried to lay down some guiding principles for “open” cloud computing in the Open Cloud Manifesto
2. Some folks reacted badly feeling that the process wasn’t actually “open”
3. Bruhaha ensued

Who cares?

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Over the past year, I have written about the various primal layers of Cloud Computing. Typically, my role is to “over simplify” in order to make the Cloud a bit more palpable by “the masses.” My colleague, Randy Bias, is the resident über-tech, so I usually leave the more complicated developer and sys-admin posts to him. As we all know, the Cloud is hot and becoming increasingly complicated as new products, services and vendors throw their hats into the ring. But is this over-complication confusing and saturating the market? I think not, in terms of the latter, but it is truly becoming more confusing.

First, we at GoGrid, broadly define Cloud Computing as such (latest definition):

On-demand self-service Internet infrastructure where you pay-as-you-go and use-only what you need, all managed by a browser, application or API.

Even that definition I feel is a bit skewed toward Infrastructure. Probably more aptly defined, it would be:

On-demand, self-service Applications, Platforms, Services or Infrastructure dynamically consumed on a pay-as-you-go basis using a browser, application or API.

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If you are currently a GoGrid customer, I want to talk to you! As you know, the Cloud is all the hype with lots of vendors, analysts and industry experts expounding the virtues and benefits. (I’m one of those who keeps the grease in the marketing buzz machine rolling.) But I’m also an advocate, not only of Cloud Computing, but especially of those using GoGrid successfully.

So, here is what I’m looking for…

• Windows Developers – people using the “Windows-side” of GoGrid. That is to say, ASP.NET, Windows Server 2008 or 2003, Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008, IIS
• Linux Developers – those implementing either Red Hat Enterprise Linux and/or CentOS
• OpenSource Users – if anyone is developing rich applications using PHP, mySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache
• Mixed Environments – of particular interest to me is those using combinations of the items above
• Failover Scenarios – are you using GoGrid as a failover site? For redundancy?
• Cloud Connect – have you created a hybrid hosting solution that you are particularly proud of, using a combination of Cloud and Dedicate hosting?
• Twitter Development – since Twitter is all the rage, are you creating the next killer app to manage the Twittersphere?
• Statistical Analysis – are you spinning up a series of high end GoGrid servers for a few hours to do number or other data crunching?
• Web 2.0/3.0 Products – how are you AJAX-ing your applications using GoGrid for hosting? What great new mashup application have you created?
• API Activity – are you using the GoGrid API in any particularly exciting way? How ARE you using the API?
• Cloud Storage – how have you mixed in GoGrid’s Cloud Storage into your infrastructure? As a backup solution? To server data?
• Digital Media Manipulation – are you using GoGrid to process large sets of digital media?
• Database intensive products – have you implemented an architecture that utilizes a high-end DB either in the GoGrid Cloud or cloud-connected to a dedicated server?

So, what do you get out of it? I can definitely promise a few things:

• Free PR and Marketing – tell us all about the product or service that you are proud of and we will write about it,  include in our newsletters and pass around various social networking sites
• Web links – we will include your site in links on our sites and blogs
• Potential presence at trade shows – if you are chosen as a showcase customer, we welcome you at our upcoming tradeshows
• Potential participation in our Referral programs – please contact me for details
• Other forms of “Thank you’s” – (wink)

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San Francisco PostgreSQL User Group’s (SFPUG) April Meetup will be held at the GoGrid offices, specifically discussing how GoGrid can be used as a Cloud hosting infrastructure for PostgreSQL applications. Space for this event is limited to 30 people (15 have already been filled as of this writing).

Location: GoGrid offices in San Francisco
Date: 4/8/09
Time: 7:00pm
RSVP: RSVP’s can be made via this site: http://postgresql.meetup.com/1/calendar/9936194/

The event will be streamed live as well. Food will be provided.

Please act now as space is limited.

Raditha Dissanayake posted a blog entry comparing Amazon EC2 and GoGrid performance. Unfortunately, we think Raditha did not use the most rigorous methodology possible for doing his comparison. It would be inappropriate for GoGrid to performance test Amazon’s EC2. In fact, their Customer Agreement may actually make such activity questionable, but IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer).

Let’s take a more rigorous look at GoGrid disk subsystem performance.

Framing the Issue

As a start the entire issue is a LOT more complex than can potentially be covered here. Today’s disks, hard drive controllers, and operating systems have many different kinds of caching mechanisms. In addition, virtualization systems like Xen can impact results in unexpected ways. For example, did you know that Xen can be deployed in two major manners?

Either ‘paravirtualized’ or ‘hardware virtualized’. The two different models almost certainly impact any testing methodology. And yes, you guessed it, Amazon and GoGrid don’t configure Xen in the same way. Amazon uses paravirtualization and GoGrid uses hardware virtualization. Beyond this public information neither Amazon nor GoGrid provide significant details about their infrastructure considering it, rightfully so, proprietary intellectual property.

Without a deep understanding of all of the issues it’s difficult to do a test much less a proper comparison.

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Last week I had the pleasure of joining Peter Silva (Technical Marketing Manager at f5) and Telemachus Luu (Director of Business Strategy at GoGrid/ServePath) in a podcast hosted by f5 on their DevCentral community site. The topic of the podcast was “Cloud Computing” (of course) but specifically how using f5 technology, ServePath and GoGrid were able to create a full spectrum of hosting solutions ranging from Dedicated and Managed Hosting (ServePath) and Colocation hosting(ColoServe), up and into the Clouds with GoGrid.

The podcast titled “Hosting in the Cloud with ServePath and F5” covers a variety of topics including:

• ServePath’s product extension from managed hosting to cloud hosting with GoGrid
• The “Cloud Pyramid” and distinctions within the various Cloud layers
• Understanding the nuances within the Cloud Infrastructure layer: “Infrastructure Web Services” & “Cloudcenters”
• How f5 was paramount in creating a Cloud Computing Infrastructure offering

I encourage you to listen to this 30 minute podcast (forgive the audio quality, we were in an empty conference room) which is available at the following locations:

• On f5’s DevCentral site
• As a downloadable MP3 file
• Play from this site (click on the graphic below)

  Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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Today we released a new Whitepaper written by Randy Bias, GoGrid’s VP of Technology Strategy titled “Scaling Your Internet Business.” If you are a Web Application Developer or interested in learning about scalability, specific to how it relates to Web Applications in or outside of the Cloud, I encourage you to give this whitepaper a read.

The whitepaper can be downloaded here from the GoGrid site.

Scalability is critical to the success of many organizations currently involved in doing business on the Web or who are providing information that may suddenly become heavily demanded. While there are many strategies that IT organizations can undertake, the way they are designed and implemented can make or break these businesses.

The GoGrid whitepaper discusses the following topics:

• How web applications scale
• Cloud Computing and scalability therein
• Thinking through and choosing a scaling strategy
• GoGrid & ServePath scalability options

Scalability can come in all shapes, sizes and flavors. You can scale “up” (vertically) or “out” (horizontally). Choosing the right option can be tricky, if not daunting. Depending on what you want your strategy to be, you can choose “cloud-only”, “dedicated/colocated-only” or a “hybrid” approach.

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