Cloud Computing is fantastic! Where else can you provision infrastructure on the fly, scale it up (add more CPU/RAM/Storage) and out (add more instances of cloud servers) and grow your infrastructure based on your business demands. At GoGrid, we believe in making complex infrastructure easy by providing you with tools to create, manage and scale your GoGrid cloud infrastructure using our web-based portal or programmatic API. But did you know that you can also create and manage your GoGrid cloud infrastructure while you are on the go using your iPhone? Back in 2010, we launched our iPhone application and we designed it to scale as we added new data centers. The application fully supports our San Francisco, Ashburn and Amsterdam data centers simply because we built the app on top of our API.

Are you a mobile apps developer? I would love to see what magic you can do with the GoGrid API in making the next generation Android or iPad application. Feel free to leave a comment on this post.

So, how do you set up the GoGrid iPhone application once you have downloaded it from the iTunes App Store? It’s pretty easy so I wanted to show the steps on setting it up in this article.

Create an API Key within the GoGrid Web Portal

The first step it to create an API key within the GoGrid web portal. You need to have a GoGrid account for this. (For those who are new to GoGrid and want to test it out specifically with the iPhone application, go to the GoGrid sign-up page and in the “Promo Code” field, enter “GGiPhone1″ and receive a $100 service credit!)

1. Log into the GoGrid portal.
2. Navigate to My Account > API Keys:
   
3. On the left, click on “Add an API key” and a new window will open:
   
4. Fill in the information. The Shared Secret is needed within the iPhone app in order to authenticate you to your infrastructure. Also, it is recommended that you use a “Super User” role so that you have full functionality within the iPhone application. Set the status to “Enabled” as well.
5. Click Save and your API key will be created.
   
6. Once the key has been created, be sure to capture it. You will need the key and the Shared Secret in the iPhone application. If you ever need to see the Shared Secret in the future, simply click on the key to see the details:
   

That’s it! With the two API key items, you are now ready to set up the iPhone application to control your infrastructure.

Setting Up Your GoGrid Account on the iPhone Application

Be sure that you first download the FREE GoGrid iPhone application from the iTunes App Store. Armed with the API Key and the Shared Secret, you are ready to configure the iPhone App. Here’s what you need to do.

1. Launch the GoGrid iPhone application.
2. If this is the first time that you have used the iPhone application, you will be prompted to enter an optional passcode. You can skip this step if you want, otherwise, we do recommend that you enter a 4-digit passcode:
   
3. Once you have set up a passcode (or authenticate in if you are a returning user), click on the “Add a New Account” in the Accounts pane:
   
4. In the New Account pane, enter in a Name for your Account (note, this is a local name only and is not transmitted back to the portal) and your API Key and Shared Secret:
   
5. Click the Done button and your new account will show in the Accounts pane:
   
6. Now click “Log In” to connect to your GoGrid infrastructure. (Note: you must have an Internet connection in order to do this.) The first screen that you will see are your GoGrid Cloud Servers:
   

Now that you have your GoGrid infrastructure connected to the iPhone app, you probably wonder what you can do with it. Also, if you ever want to remove access to your GoGrid infrastructure on the iPhone application, the easiest way to do this is to simply delete the API Key from within the GoGrid portal.

Managing your GoGrid Infrastructure via the iPhone Application

There are a variety of things that you can do with the GoGrid iPhone application once you have it configured, namely:

• View/Add/Delete/Restart GoGrid Cloud Servers
• View/Add/Edit/Delete F5 Load Balancers
• View Status of Objects and IP Addresses
• View Server User and Passwords
• View and Filter GoGrid Job History
• View Current Billing Information
• Multiple Datacenter Support
• Multiple Account Support
• Access additional information about GoGrid

While I’m not going to walk through each and every function of the iPhone application, here are some highlights:

View/Edit your Cloud Servers:

View your Load Balancers:

Add/Edit your Load Balancers:

View/Filter your IP addresses:

View your Job History:

View Account/Passwords and more:

So, if you are a current GoGrid user and have an iPhone, I encourage you to download the GoGrid iPhone application and start managing your infrastructure on the go. And perhaps, if you are a mobile or web developer, the fact that the iPhone application was built completely using our API might inspire you to craft your own mobile or web interface to control GoGrid infrastructure. If you do create something interesting and innovating, please do share it with me with your contact information so that I can check it out!

Hitting the wires in the cloud this morning was our announcement of Martini Media’s customer success story. When we work with our customers, we discover a lot of innovation at work and throughout the process, we assist in crafting the best cloud solution wherever possible. Martini Media’s unique digital platform that advertisers use to reach affluent consumers is a fantastic example of how Big Data and cloud computing can be used to drive business success.

In case you missed the Press Release, it is available here as well as below. But I encourage you, especially if you are looking for a Big Data solution, to download the Martini Media case study and then talk with one of our Cloud Solutions Architects. Through the use of our Big Data solution, hosted within the GoGrid cloud, Martini Media has been able to:

• Support 100 percent annual growth
• Realize the performance benefits of Big Data and the cost advantages of cloud computing
• Serve targeted ads in as little as 150 milliseconds
• Reduce latency and increase throughput speed

And if you need a primer on Big Data, where it came from and where it can take you, I highly recommend these two articles by GoGrid’s Rupert Tagnipes:

• “The Big Data Revolution – Part 1 – The Origins”
• “The Big Data Revolution – Part 2 – Enter the Cloud”

The Press Release is below:

Martini Media Delivers Prized Consumers to Advertisers with Help from Big Data and GoGrid

Hybrid Infrastructure Hosting from GoGrid Lets Martini Media Take Advantage of Big Data and the Cloud

San Francisco, Calif. – May 9, 2011 – GoGrid, a leading cloud infrastructure company, announced today that Martini Media, the leading digital platform for advertisers to reach affluent US consumers, trusts GoGrid to host the Big Data infrastructure for its platform. From business leaders and affluent fashionistas to big-spending frequent flyers, Martini Media delivers the right ad at the right time to people in the high-income demographic that controls 70 percent of the spending power in the US.

According to Manicka Babu, vice president of engineering at Martini Media, precise, timely ad targeting requires effective algorithms, huge quantities of data, and fast processing. “We capture and process more than 250 million online events each day,” he explains. “As you might imagine, our platform requires a substantial amount of processing power. My team focuses on continuously improving our service, and GoGrid delivers the fast, scalable, reliable infrastructure we need. It’s a formula that keeps us ahead of the competition.”

Martini Media’s goal is to serve ads within 150 to 200 milliseconds no matter where the recipient is located within the United States. Based on two identical infrastructures hosted at GoGrid’s East and West Coast data centers, Martini Media’s solution delivers. In setting up its multi-data-center solution, Martini Media worked closely with GoGrid solutions architects to develop a highly effective hybrid hosting infrastructure. Hybrid hosting uses single-tenant hardware to run processing-intensive functions, such as Hadoop and Cassandra databases, and cloud servers to handle the platform front-end.

“Hybrid is optimal for Big Data,” says Babu. “We considered four providers, and only GoGrid offered everything we wanted for a reasonable price. Most important was the hybrid architecture. GoGrid allowed us to use virtualized cloud servers for non-database functions and single-tenant hardware to run our Cassandra databases.”

Martini Media’s successful Big Data implementation using Cassandra prompted it to expand to incorporate Hadoop as well, making it one of the first customers to deploy GoGrid’s Big Data Solution.

“As Martini Media’s success demonstrates, Big Data is a powerful tool for building insights and innovative business models,” said Jeffrey Samuels, chief marketing officer for GoGrid. “We’re proud that innovators like Martini Media choose GoGrid for their infrastructure. GoGrid supports Big Data with best practices architectures that deliver the scalability of the cloud. Our new Big Data Solution is uniquely tailored to meet the power and flexibility demands of compute-intensive applications. So when it comes to Big Data, we’re confident that no one beats GoGrid for performance.”

To learn more, read the full Martini Media Big Data case study: http://go.gogrid.com/case-study/martini-media

Is your business looking to analyze complex data? And do you need infrastructure to power your analysis? GoGrid can help craft a unique, powerful and cost-effective way to succeed so be sure to contact us.

I recently attended Under the Radar 2012 as GoGrid was a sponsor of this event. As there were several tracks, Michael Sheehan and I split the tracks and I covered Infrastructure, Database Scalability and Big Data. Michael covered Mobile Access, Infrastructure, Performance Monitoring, PaaS in Part 1.  Overall, the presenting companies have some compelling ideas and it gives an indicator as to the new thinking happening in Silicon Valley. The trends that I noticed were: a continued interest in private clouds, the increase in adoption of Openstack and the prevalence integrating Big Data.

If you never attended Under the Radar, the format is to have four startups that already have a real product present for 6 minutes and are then judged by a panel of experienced executives at more established companies. The presenters had to be companies that are actual startups with a unique value proposition and a real product that they are able to monetize. Alumni or companies that are already more established can also present as a “Grad Circle” member but they are not included in the awards presented at the end of the show. And like American Idol, the audience also has a vote on their favorites for each category.  I included the Judge’s choice and Audience choice for each category but also added my own choice which reflects my own opinion and not that of GoGrid.

Infrastructure

This category focused on companies that are delivering infrastructure or infrastructure management products. So this would include services that could offer up infrastructure components (like compute, network, and storage) or even tools for managing configurations and deployments. Not surprisingly, nearly all of them focus on the cloud as the operating model of choice.

Cloudscaling – This company focuses on delivering an amazon-like cloud using Openstack. Their solution is comprised of Open Cloud OS, which is a product grade version of Openstack, Cloudblocks, a comprehensive architecture for cloud services and Hardware Blueprints, which are templates for physical hardware. Customers can leverage this solution to deploy a public or private cloud in their own DC.

Nodejitsu – Sticking with the Japanese-theme of cloud automation companies (a la Heroku), this company makes it easy for customers using Node.js to deploy and automate services on the cloud. While Heroku’s strength is Ruby, Nodejitsu focuses on Javascript which they believe to be faster and to have greater staying power than other higher level languages.

Piston Cloud Computing – Its core product, Piston Enterprise OS is a massively scalable private cloud operating system build on Openstack and is designed for any company tackling Big Data and for 1/4 the cost of VMWare.

Zadara Storage – Focused on providing low cost, block storage as a service inside the cloud. Zadara provides an easy to use and flexible storage solution on multiple leading public clouds. The product operates as a virtual private storage array.

Puppet Labs (Grad Circle) -  A former best in show company, Puppet Labs manages the open source Puppet configuration management tool, one of the leading products used  at companies like Zynga and Citrix.

Judge’s Winner:	Audience Winner:	My Choice:

Providing competition for VMWare is compelling, especially if can be done leveraging open source technologies, so Piston Cloud is also my choice in this category. Enterprises have great interest in private clouds but providing one that is based on an open technology gives more flexibility for hybrid clouds and a path to the eventual migration to the public cloud.

Database Scalability

This category focused on companies that are building out products that are designed to handle large scale datasets. This would include enhancements to open source products to better handle scale or new designs for handling larger datasets that need to be delivered faster and more efficiently. I felt that there is some overlap in this category with the Big Data category since they are interrelated. For example MongoLab can be used to solve for Big Data problems and the Big Data presenters can argue that they can also offer some form of database scalability.

Drawn to Scale – Builds a database called Spire that leverages Hadoop, Hbase and their own software to provide real-time Analysis for Big Data. This helps to solve for use cases where users already use Hadoop but need the ability to do real-time SQL queries from the data.

MemSQL – A Y combinator startup that offers an OLTP database that lives in memory. In combination with MySQL, this gives users a way to have high through-put transactions while also having persistence of data on disk.

MongoLab – Provides MongoDB as a service that is designed to better work with object-oriented development. It removes the operational and administration layer from developers and provides monitoring and backups for MongoDB.

ScaleArc – Sits in between the database and the app servers and helps with optimization and performance of MySQL-related databases. It operates like a load balancer for databases.

NuoDB (Grad Circle and formerly known as NimbusDB) – A new SQL and ACID compliant relational database that is designed to run on a distributed architecture like the cloud.

In this category, I would pick MongoLab. With MongoDB’s adoption growing in the marketplace, it’s an important alternative to have services that enhance the database, especially if it can be delivered via a public cloud.

Big Data

This category offered companies that are solving problems around Big Data. This could involve technologies that are used to better handle Big Data or services that ease the collection, transformation or analysis of Big Data.  It seemed that most presenters generated or provided large amounts of 3rd party data in addition to providing products and services for Big Data.

Chart.io – Makes charting and analytics easy for non-technical users. Able to connect to MySQL, Postgres, Google Analytics and Oracle (in the near future). Chart.io provides an alternative to heavyweight on-premise business intelligence products.

Datasift – Helps customers extract, analyze and gain value from social networks. Although it can pull from over 30 data source, it is one of two exclusive re-syndicators of Twitter data. Datasift operates in a SaaS model so companies can be up and running in minutes.

Infochimps –  Provides a full Big Data platform for processing and analyzing data from their own data marketplace or anywhere in the web. This makes it easy to source data leveraging Hadoop and providing services on top of that platform.

Metamarkets – Provides data science as a service, providing for data exploration, decision support and operational awareness. Using their own technology, the product is able to process large volumes of data at speed and scale.

Judge’s Winner:	Audience Winner:	My Choice:

Having the ability to pull 3rd party data or any data from the web and analyze it without investing in your own infrastructure is a valuable product. Hadoop is difficult to wrangle although it is currently one of the leading technologies for running Map Reduce jobs. Providing the data and services on top of Hadoop makes Infochimps a key solution in my mind.

Top Winners

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the top winners for the day:

Venture Beat People’s Choice Winner:	Best in Show – Judge’s Winner:	Best in Show – Audience Winner:

Overall, all the companies that presented were very interesting, showing the kind of innovation and creativity that we have come to expect from early stage startups. While cloud is still a strong theme here, I think that the future is moving towards Big Data. I think we will see the two themes start to converge as users start to see the power of using Big Data solutions in the cloud for performance and cost-effective deployments. The enthusiasm and effort given by these startups bode well for the technology industry and are a harbinger of the great things to come.

Last week’s Under the Radar 2012 conference (UTR) provided me and other attendees with a glimpse of what’s going to be hot in the coming year from a startup and technology standpoint. Take your pick from the following hot-list of terms: Big Data, analytics, mobile, enterprise, private cloud, security and platforms. They are all intertwined in some way or another.

The format of UTR is fun, one of the MC’s described it as the American Idol for Startups. Basically, each startup (which have been in stealth mode and only just coming from behind the curtains) had 6 minutes to do an “elevator pitch” describing their product or service, how it works, why it is important and what they are looking to achieve. The startups were grouped by a theme (Mobile Access, Infrastructure, Performance Monitoring, PaaS, Database Scalability, Cloud Services and Big Data) and there were 4 companies being judged within each category. And what about the judges? Akin to the American Idol style, they were a collection of industry experts who asked poignant and humorous questions to drill deeper into the presentation pitch. The judges then selected their choice as the winning company, and the audience got to weigh in as well via a mobile text vote.

This marked the 3^rd year that GoGrid sponsored UTR and the 2^nd year having GoGrid CMO Jeffrey Samuels as a judge on one of the startup panels (“Performance Monitoring”). And several of us from GoGrid (including Rupert Tagnipes who provides his analysis of the Infrastructure, Database Scalability and Big Data sessions he covered in his Part 2 article) attended the sessions to see what upcoming technology trends were emerging, what companies were concerned about and what direction we are all heading. Personally, I attended the Mobile Access, Performance Monitoring and PaaS sessions and my analysis and personal winner choices for these sessions are below (note: my choices are my own opinion and not that of GoGrid.)

From the sessions that I saw, there seemed to be a clear trend of enterprise mobility, security, data analysis and simply “making things easier.” Also, a majority of the companies presenting seemed to have well vetted business plans, were monetizing and actually have customers and users. This is obviously a big difference from those wonderful “dot-com” days when you really didn’t need anything and VCs simply threw money at you. Conversely, while supposedly coming out of stealth-mode, most of these presenting companies were well down the path of success. The sections below include the Judge’s Winner, the Audience Winner, and My Choice.

Mobile Access

Mobile Access is a HOT category, in my opinion, and I believe that it was a good move by the UTR staff to have them be the first session to present. Bitzer Mobile kicked things off, grabbing attention through the fear of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) within the Enterprise. Their premise? Mobile devices are not locked down by IT, unlike other technology devices within an organization. Their solution focused on installing a server on the DMZ then creating an app tunnel via VPN with seamless integration for private and public access. Next up was Duo Security, whose service brings two-factor authentication easily via mobile devices. Their goal is to do away with security keyfobs and put this authentication in the hands of users via mobile phone notifications for authentication as the second factor. After Duo Security came Framehawk which marries virtualization and HTML5 to provide enterprise-grade content and application delivery on mobile devices. Essentially, a secure connection is opened to applications behind the firewall when needed (e.g., for confidential data, documents or application) and you interact graphically, but not as an app on your device. And last up was ionGrid, which was another on-prem service that enables enterprise tablet uses to have a secure solution for their behind-the-firewall content.

Judge’s Winner:	Audience Winner:	My Choice:

It seems to me that the mobile space is becoming more complex and enterprise requirements are pushing the technology envelope. Ensuring that your corporate data is protected and secure, yet accessible on the road, is a hot value proposition that I believe many companies (developers and end users) will be creating and adopting in the coming year. For me, Framehawk provided the most interesting service (and eye-candy) through their use of virtualization and secure transport of confidential data to mobile devices.

Performance Monitoring

Building the next hot social or business service is compelling. The cloud enables rapid scalability of infrastructure and, consequently, applications and services residing within it. As your success booms, so does all of your infrastructure sprawl. Interconnected networks and server architecture means that while you can scale, the possibilities of something going wrong scales as well. Consequently, you need to have a looking glass into how your application and its underlying infrastructure is performing, where errors are being thrown and where optimizations can be made.

In this track, the presenting companies provided services to help you grow your technology footprint and monitor it as it expands. And the simplification of disparate services into a consolidated service allows for companies to focus more on developing their product, predicting and analyzing the growth, and less about putting out fires in a reactive manner. The first presenter in this category was Fabric Engine which allows developers to increase the performance of their scripts to match the performance of multi-threaded C++ but without having to recode using scarce C++ developers to do so. Using a combination of the Fabric Engine product and the developer’s preferred language like javascript, compute-bound problems are solved. Next was Iron.io whose services allows you to monitor, schedule and queue complex routing between servers. The interface with the system is via APIs and IronMQ (a messaging queue) and Iron.io provisions infrastructure behind the scenes. Sumo Logic presented their solution for log and data analysis which is a cloud-based service that can consolidate, monitor and analyze log files from servers and infrastructures across an architecture. Utilizing Big Data for real-time insights, IT professionals gain access to a cost-effective, minimal administration analysis services of their infrastructure logs. Last up was Tracelytics who provides performance monitoring and analytics across the infrastructure stack. Using a system of collectors, users are able to look at all layers of their infrastructure in order to drill down to the performance of specific components and understand where issues or bottlenecks reside. Rather than being focused on simply particular components, their system traces inefficiencies throughout a customer’s IT topology.

While it seems that the judges and the audience both deemed Sumo Logic as the winner, I personally found the service by Tracelytics to be compelling simply because I view the integrated approach to monitoring all aspects of an IT footprint to be critical to the success of an infrastructure stack.

PaaS

PaaS (Platform as a Service) has sort of been the “sleeper” layer of the Cloud Pyramid for a few years, in my opinion. There is plenty of attention being paid to Software as a Service (being probably the most explosive and extensively used layer) and the fact that SaaS and PaaS can be built upon the Infrastructure layer makes IaaS a critical component to any business’s IT environment. But I believe that PaaS is “the next hotness” and we should expect to see many more emerging companies developing services around platform delivery. This is particularly critical around the mobile space, which as I mentioned, is another hotness that is growing exponentially. If there are aspects of mobile development that can be shored up using a platform service, those are the initiatives to watch. However, this is not just limited to mobile, but also to other development frameworks that are gaining traction within the development community.

Kicking off this session was AppHarbor who positions themselves as a .NET PaaS and an alternative to Microsoft Azure. AppHarbor claims that Azure is simply a bit too “Microsoft-heavy” and that Microsoft seems to innovate a bit more slowly than market demands dictate. Consequently, AppHarbor offers a fully-managed .NET stack with a robust 3rd party add-on marketplace. The next presenter was Cabana who provides a browser-based mobile application development platform and API. Capitalizing on the “mobile development sucks” (it’s to hard, expensive and slow), their visual designer allows mobile developers to create HTML5 mobile applications via a GUI. This means faster iterations and time to market, a critical component to successful deployments of mobile services. Up next was CloudBees, which is a Java application delivery services in the form of a PaaS. Touted to be one of the fastest ways to build and deploy Java applications, their service streamlines not only the development process but also its deployment and delivery. Like other PaaS offerings, CloudBees abstracts the underlying infrastructure and allows corporations to focus on the core Java app development needs. Last up was StackMob, which is a PaaS targeted towards mobile app developers using a coupling of HTML5 and back-end services to build mobile apps using APIs and custom code while providing analytics, application management, social integration and notifications to round out the stack.

Judge’s Winner:	Audience Winner:	My Choice:

As I mentioned, mobile, especially in the enterprise, is going to be a category to watch in the coming years. A couple of these PaaS providers have streamlined the process to make this go-to-market strategy and execution just a little bit easier. Personally, I found Cabana’s offering to be the most compelling and interesting simply because they are looking at both ends of the equation, content creators and content users, in crafting their platform.

Top Winners

Here’s a recap of the overall winners:

Venture Beat People’s Choice Winner:	Best in Show – Judge’s Winner:	Best in Show – Audience Winner:

I have always been wowed by the next “bright and shiny” product or service that comes out of stealth mode and what I saw at UTR 2012 is no exception. I do feel that many of these emerging companies are much further along in their business plans than those of yesteryear, having fully functional and monetized services. Cloud computing still seems to be an underlying theme, with many of these companies’ services built using some sort of cloud technology. The cloud is an enabling service that is allowing business to push the “what if” scenarios that many up-and-coming companies are striving to conquer with new and exciting services. However, cloud is more of a background service, in my opinion, a simple requirement that is needed to produce the next Platform as a Service, Mobile App development and delivery mechanism, or Big Data or analytics service. Using cloud as a foundation, I expect to see explosive growth around many of the categories presented at Under the Radar 2012.

When you purchase a car, you obviously think a lot about its performance before you buy. How much horsepower does it have? Is the car safe? How does it handle? Is the gas mileage going to break the bank or will you be saving the environment? Is the vehicle flexible enough to meet all your needs or just suitable for one activity like off-roading?

When you think about cloud computing, specifically cloud infrastructure, performance matters as well. And there are many factors to consider when shopping for a cloud provider or partner. How’s their VM performance? Does their network provide multiple high-bandwidth pipes to support your network-hungry application or service? Are there any I/O bottlenecks? If your website comes under heavy load, can you burst to support it and then scale back when demand subsides?

These are important considerations. Would you want a car that has no acceleration when getting on a highway? Probably not. That’s the same reason you wouldn’t want a cloud that is over-subscribed or doesn’t have the architecture to support your business needs.

Speaking of “performance,” this is our third year sponsoring the Under the Radar (UTR) conference and marks the second year that our CMO, Jeffrey Samuels, being a judge there. This year, Jeff will be on the panel for the Performance Monitoring session. Here are the companies presenting in this session:

• Fabric Engine – lets developers write high-performance application using dynamic languages
• Iron.io – provides elastic products for cloud messaging and background processing
• Sumo Logic – gives real-time Big Data and IT insights of log intelligence and analytics
• Tracelytics – provides insights into the performance of web applications

Tuning your application or infrastructure for the best performance possible is a critical check-box when moving into production. And monitoring how everything performs once it’s released is another. One quick and easy way to get a jump-start on these two items is to choose a cloud provider with a reputation as a solid performer. As the Technology Evangelist of GoGrid, I’m particularly proud of our performance over the past years. We’ve been independently benchmarked as providing market-leading I/O performance and also lead the pack in uptime from an SLA standpoint. Our network availability and performance remain unparalleled. And we craft unique infrastructure solutions to ensure performance is there when you need it, whether it’s with a completely public cloud solution, a hybrid infrastructure (mixture of cloud and physical servers), or a private cloud instance. And our recently announced Big Data solution couples performance with the scalability that developers, analytics firms, advertisers, and social media companies are demanding.

I look forward to seeing the innovations companies are presenting at UTR this year, and can’t wait to meet many of you personally. Best of luck to all the presenters. May you truly “perform!”