Archive for the ‘Release’ Category
Thursday, March 14th, 2013 by Rupert Tagnipes March 14th, 2013 7:23 amRupert Tagnipes
One of the recent trends in technology is the movement toward software-defined networks (SDN). With SDN, networking is no longer tied to a specific proprietary device but rather integrated via software. GoGrid has adopted this software defined networking architecture for its new product offerings starting with Dynamic Load Balancers and now with our new Firewall Service.
SDN typically means that the control plane is separated from the forwarding plane and is centralized. This setup is easier to manage and enables a more distributed system. In addition, management of the network is typically programmatic with SDN. In GoGrid’s architecture, for example, management is centralized while the activities are distributed. This design allows for greater resiliency and self-healing capabilities, meaning there’s always a way to return a failed distributed node to its previously stable state. We also enable access to these services via our management console and a public RESTful API.
Although most people think of SDN as it applies to the core (switches and routers), GoGrid’s strategy has been to start at the edge and then work toward the core. Dynamic Load Balancers and the Firewall Service are considered to be on the network edge. However, other services closer to the core, such as Private Network Automation (PNA), have adopted this architecture as well. Details about the Dynamic Load Balancer are explained in this previous blog post.
Firewall Service
GoGrid is introducing a new Firewall Service designed to be self-healing and available to all customers in all our data centers. Customers can deploy this service through the management console or API. Having a Firewall Service available to all our customers is an important step in further securing infrastructure in the cloud. Although GoGrid has secured its data centers and has built-in security measures to protect our customers’ infrastructure, our customers want greater granular control of port access for their individual servers. Our new Firewall Service is designed to meet and exceed those needs by making it easy to set up security wherever Cloud Servers are located.
This service comes with several key features: (more…) «Software Defined Networking on the Edge»
Tags: Central Management, firewall, Global objects, SDN, Security, Security Groups, Self-healing, Software Defined Networking
Posted in API, Cloud Computing, Cloud Security, Features, GoGrid, Public Cloud, Release, Security | No Comments »
Monday, February 4th, 2013 by Rupert Tagnipes February 4th, 2013 8:05 amRupert Tagnipes
Building out a highly available website means that it is fault-tolerant and reliable. A best practice is to put your web servers behind a load balancer not only to distribute load, but also to mitigate the risk of an end user accessing a failing web server. However, traditional load balancing funnels traffic into a single-tenant environment—a single point of failure. A better practice is to have a distributed load balancer that takes advantage of the features of the cloud and increases the fault-tolerance abilities on the load balancer. GoGrid’s Dynamic Load Balancer service is designed around a software-defined networking (SDN) architecture that turns the data center into one big load balancer.
GoGrid’s Dynamic Load Balancer offers many features, but one of its core features is high availability (HA). It is HA in two ways.
First, on the real server side, deploying multiple clones of your real servers is a standard load-balancing practice. That way, if one of your servers goes down, the load balancer will use the remaining servers in the pool to continue to serve up content. In addition, each GoGrid cloud server that you deploy as a web server (in the real server pool) is most likely on a different physical node. This setup provides additional protection in the case of hardware failure.
Second, on the Dynamic Load Balancer side, the load balancers are designed to be self-healing. In case of a hardware failure, Dynamic Load Balancing is designed to immediately recover to a functioning node. The Virtual IP address of the Dynamic Load Balancer (the VIP) is maintained as well as all the configurations, with all the changes happening on the back end. This approach ensures the Dynamic Load Balancer will continue to function with minimal interruption, preventing the Dynamic Load Balancer from being a single point of failure. Because the load balancer is the public-facing side of a web server, whenever it goes down the website goes down. Having a self-healing load balancer therefore makes the web application more resilient.
Users with websites or applications that need to always be available would benefit from including GoGrid’s Dynamic Load Balancing in their infrastructure. The load balancer is important for ensuring the public side of a service is always available; however, including easily scalable cloud servers, the ability to store images of those servers in persistent storage, and the option to replicate infrastructure between data centers with CloudLink are all important elements of a successful HA setup.
(more…) «High Availability with Dynamic Load Balancers»
Tags: any IP, cloud, Cloud Computing, Dynamic Load Balancer, fault tolerance, GoGrid, high availability, IaaS, IP Address, load balancing, Management Console, Real Server, RESTful API, SDN, software defined network, VIP
Posted in Cloud Computing, Features, General, GoGrid, Load Balancer, Public Cloud, Release | No Comments »
Tuesday, January 29th, 2013 by Rupert Tagnipes January 29th, 2013 9:50 amRupert Tagnipes
GoGrid has recently released some new features that improve on the customer experience using our private network. Private Network Automation (PNA) is currently available in all our data centers. As of this most recent release, these new features will be exposed if you enable PNA by contacting support:
- All servers will have a private IP assigned upon creation (both virtual and dedicated)
- Any private IPs that are used will be marked as assigned on the portal
- Cloud Storage no longer requires static routes. It is now accessible via your favorite protocol (Samba, SCP, etc.)
The assignment of private IPs happen automatically at the time a new server is deployed. GoGrid has enabled this for all new customers. If you are an existing customer, this is feature IS NOT enabled in data centers where you have servers deployed. You will need to file a support ticket to request this feature. Note that once enabled, this will be active for all new servers only – existing servers will keep their existing settings.
As you can see from the screenshot below, once you create the server, you will have a public IP and a private IP assigned. Note that this feature is enabled for both virtual and dedicated servers.
This is also visible in the Networking tab so that you can monitor private IPs that have been assigned from your block.
(more…) «Leverage Automation for your Private Network»
Tags: cloud, Cloud Computing, Cloud Storage, Features, General, IaaS, IP Address, NIC, private network, Private Network Automation, Public Cloud
Posted in Cloud Server, Datacenter, Features, General, GoGrid, How To, Public Cloud, Release, Security | No Comments »
Thursday, August 23rd, 2012 by Michael Sheehan 
August 23rd, 2012 3:05 amMichael Sheehan
Our GoGrid cloud services engineers are always working away making visible and behind-the-scenes improvements to the customer experience on GoGrid. Today, we rolled out some enhancements to the customer management console that we wanted to highlight. Although several of these changes won’t be immediately apparent to all customers, we’ve done a lot of work to the underpinnings and architecture powering the management console.
So that GoGrid customers are aware of these changes and updates, I’ve summarized the most notable ones within this article.
Pre-Populated IP List Dropdown
In the previous version of the management console, when you were creating a new cloud server, you needed to start typing the IP address you wanted assigned to your server for the list to begin populating.
Now, when you create a new cloud server, all the available IP addresses in your account will be pre-populated into a dropdown. Remember: GoGrid provides a free, contiguous block of static IP addresses for your server.
(more…) «Enhancements to the GoGrid Management Console»
Tags: changes, cloud, Cloud Computing, Cloud Management, Cloud Server, Cloud Storage, control panel, customer portal, GoGrid, GUI, Management Console, portal, UI, Update, Upgrade
Posted in Cloud Computing, Cloud Server, Cloudcenter, Datacenter, FAQs, Features, General, GoGrid, Public Cloud, Release | No Comments »
Monday, February 13th, 2012 by Bobby Brown February 13th, 2012 8:30 amBobby Brown
Today is very important milestone for all of us here at GoGrid. While we have always considered ourselves an international company, with over 35% of our customers located outside the US, expanding to our first international location is an exciting step for GoGrid and marks the beginning of many great things to come. And today is that day that we are “throwing open the doors” of our new data center in Europe. I am extremely pleased to announce the general availability of our newest data center in Amsterdam, which represents the culmination of our team’s hard work and big dreams.
Our Amsterdam data center is housed in a state-of-the-art Equinix facility which has proven to be a perfect fit for GoGrid. My team and I had a great time working with the Equinix team while we were getting things up and running. Particularly impressive is the Internet connectivity from our Amsterdam data center to the rest of Europe which makes this location the best choice for us.
When I wasn’t at the Equinix facility supervising the installation and rollout, I was also visiting our new European headquarters in Amstelveen. Just minutes from Amsterdam and our data center, Amstelveen is a prime location for GoGrid’s EMEA headquarters and is also home to major offices for companies like HP, Agilent, Cannon, and Ricoh.
While this expansion is clearly an important step for GoGrid, it is also an incredible personal accomplishment for me. When I started working at GoGrid seven years ago, I asked founder John Keagy if he could foresee an opportunity for eventual international expansion. His answer? Absolutely. You can imagine how amazing it was for me to take on the role of lead executive for this expansion and see our vision become a reality.
I’ve spent countless hours in data centers throughout my career, but being in our data center in Amsterdam in the middle of the night when we first flipped the switch to allow some initial beta customers test the environment out, and then seeing those green lights flashing away was an experience I’ll never forget.
(more…) «GoGrid Amsterdam Data Center Now Open – An Important Milestone for GoGrid & Me Personally»
Tags: Amsterdam, cloud, Cloud Computing, Cloud infrastructure, Data Center, EMEA, Equinix, Europe, Global, GoGrid, IaaS, infrastructure as a service
Posted in Cloud Computing, Cloudcenter, Datacenter, General, GoGrid, Hosting, Release | No Comments »
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