On Wednesday, we held a webinar titled: “Load Balancing in the GoGrid Cloud – Utilizing F5 BIG IP to Manage Traffic Spikes & Uptime“. As with previous webinars, we wanted to make this GoGrid webinar public to other users in case you were not able to attend.

The agenda of the webinar was as follows:

• Overview of GoGrid and F5 Networks
• Load balancing with GoGrid and F5 BIG IP
  • Benefits of load balancing overview
  • Use cases
  • Best practices
• Question and Answer Session

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We are excited to announce a joint webinar with F5 and GoGrid that discusses the top Use Cases and Best Practices for load balancing in a public cloud. When GoGrid launched several years ago, we were pleased to have F5 as a technology partner in our initial offering. It remains a core feature of the GoGrid Cloud today. Recently, with the addition of our East Coast datacenter, we released load balancing for GoGrid infrastructures in that datacenter as well.

Many current GoGrid users are not taking advantage of our free F5 load balancing so if you are one of those customers, we encourage you to attend this webinar. Things to think about:

• You can prevent application downtime – when you have more than one server in a load balanced environment, you can rest assured that if one of those servers happens to become unavailable, traffic to your site is automatically redirected to the other available server(s).
• Scaling infrastructure – without a load balancer in place, it can be difficult to scale up (or down) your infrastructure.
• 1-2-3 Process – deploying a load balancer is just a matter of filling out a form and once you configure it, your new load balancer is available in minutes.
• Moving beyond the “Free” offering – if your routing needs are more complex, we are here to help with other solutions.

Webinar Details

Title: “Load Balancing in the GoGrid Cloud – Utilizing F5 BIG IP to Manage Traffic Spikes and Uptime”
Date: Wednesday, 8/25/10
Time: 10:00 AM – 10:30 AM Pacific Daylight Time
Registration: http://go.gogrid.com/webinars/20100825

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GoGrid Partner, Sentrigo, a database security software innovator, today announced that it will host a webinar with GoGrid focusing on Building Secure, Scalable and Stable databases in the Cloud. The Webinar details are as follows:

Date: Thursday August 12, 2010
Time: 10:00 am (Pacific Daylight time)
Duration: 1 hour
Registration: http://bit.ly/bNkfd1

Topics to be covered are:

• Intro to cloud web service and management tools
• Best practices in deploying databases in the cloud
• Available data storage options
• Technical challenges when protecting remote databases
• Securing databases in the cloud

Sentrigo currently has its Hedgehog Database Compliance and Security Suite images available on GoGrid as CentOS 5.3 and Windows Server 2008 server images:

The following Press Release was delivered today discussing the upcoming Webinar.

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This month, we tried something a bit different with our Customer Newsletter for August 2010 in that we sent the newsletter from our Service Teams. In case you didn’t already know this, every GoGrid customer is assigned a service team to help our customers manage and grow their GoGrid account and answer any questions customers may have. The teams consist of an Account Manager, a Support Specialist, a Billing Specialist, a Data Center Technician and a Network Specialist.

Even though it is the summer here, we are hard at work growing the GoGrid product and feature offering as we strive to live up to our new Unique Value Proposition: “Complex Infrastructure Made Easy™”.

Below is the full content of the August 2010 Customer Update newsletter that went out to all GoGrid customers:

Hello,

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With the launch of the new GoGrid website and GoGrid 3.0, we also spent some time on a new calculator to help you estimate your costs of running your infrastructure on GoGrid. The calculator, just like GoGrid, is extremely easy to use and can definitely help you plan out your infrastructure in the GoGrid cloud.

Features of the calculator include:

• The ability to add numerous configurations of Cloud Servers (RAM/Hours Deployed/# of servers with that configuration)
• Add Load Balancing
• Add Cloud Storage
• Configure Inbound and Outbound monthly transfer
• Plan recommendations based on your configuration
• Estimated total monthly cost

So, for example, below is the following configuration:

• 2 – 2GB servers running for 30 days (720 hours)
• 2 – 4GB servers running for 30 days (720 hours)
• Load balancer –> it’s FREE
• 24 GB of Cloud Storage –> first 10 GBs are free so the charge is for 14 GB/Month @ $0.15/GB/mo
• 20 GB/mo Outbound Data Transfer ($0.29/GB/mo)
• Inbound data transfer –> it’s FREE

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With the release of GoGrid 3.0 a few weeks ago, we held a webinar titled “Complex Infrastructure Made Easy – Learn About the GoGrid 3.0 Release & Our New East Coast Datacenter“. This webinar was primarily geared towards current GoGrid customers. We also did a webinar the next day that was targeted at people who are new to Cloud Computing and GoGrid. I will be posting that webinar shortly as well.

This webinar was recorded on June 28, 2010, the day of the official release of GoGrid 3.0. Presenters were Mario Olivarez & Justin Kitagawa of GoGrid and Ryan Holland of TrendMicro. The topics included:

• Overview: Complex Infrastructure Made Easy – GoGrid’s unique value proposition
• GoGrid 3.0: The latest version of the GoGrid platform – East Coast demo
• GoGrid Security: New services from Cisco, Fortinet, TrendMicro & Sentrigo
• PCI Compliance: PCI compliance in the GoGrid Cloud – Demo with TrendMicro
• Questions & Answers

I realize that not all GoGrid customers were able to attend this webinar, so I have provided the full recording below (it is also available on our Vimeo channel):

GoGrid 3.0 Webinar: Learn About the GoGrid 3.0 Release & New Datacenter from GoGrid on Vimeo.

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Last night, the GoGrid Engineering and Network teams toiled late into the night preparing for the launch of GoGrid version 3.0. Those of you current GoGrid users may have already noticed the updated login screen:

Well, I wanted to give everyone a small update on this upcoming release, especially those GoGrid users who have logged in and seen some slightly changed interfaces.

Note: below the “Highlights of Changes” section is information on two upcoming WEBINARS for future and current GoGrid users. I encourage you to register for one of those.

First, if you want to read a bit more about some of the features included in GoGrid v3.0, take a look at the GoGrid Software Update page. Most importantly, this update lays the groundwork for the opening of our new East Coast datacenter (US-East-1) in Ashburn, VA. To accommodate this expansion, we’ve made some now-visible changes to the following:

• Billing Widget – easier to read & gives you Memory Usage at a glance
• List View Panel – the network widget has been removed and is now enhanced within the List View, making it much easier to view your public and private IP address across datacenters
• Workflow Changes – see below for details on this change

Highlights of Changes

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Since the launch of GoGrid over 2 years ago, we have provided free F5 load balancing as part of our Cloud Infrastructure offering. Being able to provide load-balanced solutions in the cloud is critical to having a scalable environment and without F5′s load balancers, our service offering would be very different.

But understanding the nitty-gritty details of how the F5′s work within GoGrid is not something that most people understand. For the most part, customers are concerned that it simply works and works well, which it does. Yesterday, Lori MacVittie, the Technical Marketing Manager at F5, posted a technical article that does a great job explaining how the magic behind the scenes works with the F5 load balancers and GoGrid.

The article is available on F5′s DevCentral as well as below:

Cloud Load Balancing Fu for Developers Helps Avoid Scaling Gotchas

If you don’t know how scaling services work in a cloud environment you may not like the results

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This week, GoGrid was not only an exhibitor and Silver Sponsor of the Cloud Connect Event 2010 in Santa Clara, CA, but also our Lead Senior Software Engineer, Justin Kitagawa, was part of a panel titled “Writing Code for Many Clouds“.

The panel was moderated by Shlomo Swidler (Founder, Orchestratus) and the members included:

• Shashi Mysore, Product Specialist, Eucalyptus Systems
• Adrian Cole, Founder, jClouds
• George Reese, CTO, enStratus
• Michael Mayo, Rackspace
• Mitch Garnaat, President, CloudRight
• Justin Kitagawa, Lead Senior Software Engineer, GoGrid
• Sam Ramji, Vice President of Strategy, Sonoa Systems

Each panel member was allowed a few minutes to discuss how their service can be controlled programmatically via an API or other method. This is an important discussion point because many companies and developers are looking to build applications that span clouds. However prior to doing this, these developers must fully understand how a cloud is architected and can be utilized. Obviously, when building a cloud as a vendor, there are challenges and hurdles that must be overcome in the process. Each of the panelists discussed their design decisions and then answered questions presented to them by the moderator as well as by audience members.

As an attendee of this panel, I thought it important to present GoGrid’s thoughts on our own API and how we came to make the decisions behind its development. Below is a video of Justin’s presentation which covers: (more…)

Don’t miss Cloud Connect Event 2010, the first event to bring together executives, IT professionals and developers to explore and define the cloud. See the latest cloud technologies and learn from thought leaders in Cloud Connect’s comprehensive conference and expo . March 15-18, 2010 http://cloudconnectevent.com/

GoGrid is a sponsor of this premier Cloud Computing event and will have a booth there. We hope that you will come and visit us to discuss your Cloud Computing plans. Our staff there will be available for infrastructure consultations, demos and general discussion about the Cloud.

Also, Justin Kitagawa, Senior Technical Lead at GoGrid, will be part of a panel called: “Writing Code for Many Clouds” which is on Tuesday, March 16 (1:30-2:30PM). The panel details are as follows:

Writing Code for Many Clouds

Tuesday, March 16 1:30 PM–2:30 PM

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