This past Wednesday night, GoGrid was the host of another StartUp SF (along with co-host Microsoft BizSpark of which we are a Hosting Partner). The guest speaker was David Weekly, founder of PBWorks, a client of GoGrid & ServePath. StartUp SF is a regular meetup in San Francisco designed to help young businesses become more successful. Each meetup has a format designed to stimulate, engage and network in a social learning environment. Each event has a guest speaker who talks about expert subject matter and how it relates to helping startups. Also, successful companies showcase their products and services in an interactive manner with product demos occurring throughout the event.
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
GoGrid user Mitch Denny created an outstanding use of the GoGrid API using Windows PowerShell. For the uninitiated, Windows PowerShell is a command line shell and scripting language designed to help IT professionals achieve greater control and productivity through the use of of an admin-focused scripting language, complete with 130 standard command line tools, consistent syntax and utilities (paraphrased from the PowerShell product page). PowerShell runs on Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003 and Server 2008 and is a great way for sysadmins to control existing IT infrastructure through scripting.
The GoGrid API has been available for some time now and I have been waiting for a stellar use of it to showcase. (I’m still waiting for a very resourceful developer to use it either to create an iPhone web application or stand-alone application…hint, hint.) Mitch, who is an avid .NET developer from Australia and Senior Consultant at Readify, created a PowerShell Snap-in for GoGrid which uses the GoGrid API. His project, documented here, is open-source, hosted at CodePlex, and seems like will continue to evolve. Currently a Beta2 release, the “PowerShell Snap-in for GoGrid” was designed to “demonstrate how useful it can be for infrastructure-level SaaS providers to expose an API for their customers to use.” Mitch has some good visions on how and why API’s should be available, including:
Configure applications for performance testing.
Run load agents for performance testing.
Test disaster recovery scenarios.
Provision hardware for project work (i.e. development teams).
Support instructor led training with virtualised labs.
Host demonstration environments for presentations.
Controlling scale of your underling SaaS infrastructure.
Mitch’s code seems to work quite well. Following his instructions, I actually used it to provision a new load balancer within my GoGrid instance. It simply worked and took just a few minutes to set up. It’s actually fun executing the commands within PowerShell and watching devices magically appear within the GoGrid GUI.
What you need to get started:
A GoGrid account – sign up now!. You will need access to the GoGrid portal in order to create an API Key.
Windows PowerShell – download it from the Microsoft website here. Be sure to select the proper version for your OS. Have it fully installed before you start.
The PowerShell Snap-In for GoGrid – this is the CodePlex project page, current version is “GoGrid 1.0 (BETA2)”. As of this writing, some of the Wiki pages describing some of the actions have not been fully built out but I expect that to change over time. The Snap-In is available for download in the upper right of the project page.
Today the Internet was abuzz with the latest Steve Jobs’ Keynote address at the Apple World Wide Developers Conference, so much so that Twitter was brought to its knees and other blogging sites were overwhelmed with repeated traffic requests. I watch the action on a variety of sources (pictures and text from Engadget and Audio being streamed through uStream). It was a bit painful having to manual refresh or have audio drop during the keynote speech, but the announcements were eventually heard world-wide.
This post is not about the iPhone though but rather about a new GoGrid customer who was recently written up on TechCrunch, ScribbleLive. ScribbleLive is an Ajax-based, Live Blogging platform that enables authors to cover live events in a real-time manner. Billed as a “media rich conference call” ScribbleLive provides audiences an immersive experience on browsers and mobile devices alike, pushing text, links, pictures and videos instantly without the need to constantly reload the browser page.
What makes this story noteworthy is that ScribbleLive is a true, bootstrapped startup. The company, founded by Jonathan Keebler and Michael De Monte, was put together for about $1500. They are only 2 employees but have set up an infrastructure of a well-established company, with GoGrid powering their Application and Database servers and Akamai providing the CDN (content delivery network).
During the WWDC event, they ran their own “System Status” LiveBlog to keep users up to date on the systems powering other users live-blogging. Some highlights:
The day before the event they were getting 181,000+ page views
Throughput before, during and after the event ranged between 1.3 to 4.6 Mbits/sec
Front-end servers maintained 2% CPU utilization
Database server peaked at 7% CPU utilization
1.5 hours before the event, 1+ unique visitors/sec were accessing the site
GoGrid is starting to get some traction around the world. Many users are seeing how “controlling the cloud” is becoming the clear way to go when choosing a cloud hosting solution. Obviously, Amazon EC2 is pushing hard to be the leader and GoGrid is biting at their heels. In many cases, GoGrid actually offers a better service than many of the other cloud computing companies out there with offerings like:
Free F5 load balancing
Persistent servers
Linux AND Windows server images with full root or administrator access
Static IPs
Meter pricing
Facebook QuickStart Servers
Free Support
But don’t just take my word for it. Here are what others have to say:
Bub.blicio.us
I guess you can think of GoGrid as Web 2.0 meets cloud computing with traditional hosting thrown in for a complete solution. If you’re a Facebook developer, give it a shot, it just might save you time and money while helping you start building your user-base, today.
If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area tomorrow (April 30th) we hope that you can attend StartUp SF, a meetup designed to help you “kickstart your startup.”
Topic – “Genesis of a Startup: from Concept to Company”
Early Validation — Before you start in earnest, you might wonder — What makes a good idea? Is yours worth pursuing? How do you size your opportunity?
Covering the Basics — A handful of best-practices recommendations for general company administration: corporate formation, capital structure, legal, accounting, etc.
Building the Core Team — How do you attract talent at this very early stage? What kinds of players will you need pre-funding? Post-funding?
Market Validation — How do you execute to prove you have a winning idea? What milestones make sense for your business?
Fund Raising — When should you raise money? Who should be your target funding sources? How much should you raise? What are common investment terms?
Demo table companies: Triggit, Askpedia and MotivePath. Also come see a demo of GoGrid, a definite “must have” for any startup.
This note was sent to us by a new GoGrid user (Hareem Haque) and frankly it scared us. But then we read on further in the note:
“Honestly speaking. Your GoGrid is all false advertising. It does a whole lot more then what is stated on the site. I ran a CentOS 4.4 server yesterday for a brief but crucial period. The unit itself gave me no headaches. I simply installed all my apps. And off we were testing the app with our clients. Everything worked fine and flawlessly. Thanks to the load balancer we did some load tests. And I could not find anything bad about GoGrid. I am going to start moving my EC2 instance applications over to GoGrid. “
Hareem, who works in Telecommunications in Canada, currently has 4 Amazon Machine Images (AMI’s) running on Amazon’s EC2 (all clones) running as a clustered FTP server and is now in the process of replicating this environment on GoGrid. He set up a CentOS 4.4 server on GoGrid and installed vsftpd on it and ran some tests of 10 – 20MB Flash Video Files (.flv) , moving then to 2 – 100MB Window Media Video (.wmv) files and finally 1 – 1GB MPEG-4 (.mp4) file. He got a throughput of 10mbps with GoGrid and only 7mbps with EC2. With these solid benchmarks, he’s moving forward with more GoGrid servers now.
He also said he was extremely happy that there was no charge for the load-balancing and that it “came in handy.”
Author’s Note: This post was revised on 6/23/08. The nature of computing is under going a revolution and rather than fully remove this post, I elected to refresh it so as to provide a better framework for readers.
There seems to be a lot of debate around different types of Computing Terms being used to describe server and hosting solutions. In fact, in the past, the blogosphere seemed to throw around terms like Grid, Cloud, Utility, Distributed and Cluster computing almost interchangeably. But, as of this revision, one term is rising to the top: Cloud Computing. (See recent trend analysis here.)
The definitions vary from source to source, author to author. While I cannot (and will not) attempt to articulate the end-all definition, I can write about how I view these terms and how they apply to the products that we offer, namely GoGrid. But before I dive into MY interpretation, providing what others view on these subjects may shed some light on our framework.
Terms as defined by Wikipedia
Many people view Wikipedia as an authoritative source of information but that is always subject to debate. Wikipedia defines some of these terms as follows (not the end-all definitions though) and I have taken some liberties of removing non-relevant information for argument’s sake:
Multiple independent computing clusters which act like a “grid” because they are composed of resource nodes not located within a single administrative domain. (formal)
Offering online computation or storage as a metered commercial service, known as utility computing, computing on demand, or cloud computing.
The creation of a “virtual supercomputer” by using spare computing resources within an organization.
This past Wednesday night, GoGrid was the host of another StartUp SF (along with co-host Microsoft BizSpark of which we are a Hosting Partner). The guest speaker was David Weekly, founder of PBWorks, a client of GoGrid & ServePath. StartUp SF is a regular meetup in San Francisco designed to help young businesses become more successful. Each meetup has a format designed to stimulate, engage and network in a social learning environment. Each event has a guest speaker who talks about expert subject matter and how it relates to helping startups. Also, successful companies showcase their products and services in an interactive manner with product demos occurring throughout the event.
GoGrid
Many people view Wikipedia as an authoritative source of information but that is always subject to debate. Wikipedia defines some of these terms as follows (not the end-all definitions though) and I have taken some liberties of removing non-relevant information for argument’s sake: