We are excited to announce the availability of the GoGrid iPhone application, a new way to quickly and easily control your GoGrid Cloud infrastructure on the go. Current GoGrid customers can now enjoy robust and complete control of their GoGrid environment using this new iOS application, designed to work on the iPhone and network-connected iPod Touches. The application can be downloaded from iTunes now.

The GoGrid iPhone application leverages GoGrid’s OpenSource API for full control of the essential GoGrid functionality and mirrors the capabilities currently available within GoGrid’s award-winning web portal. Management abilities include:

• 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

First, some things to know about the GoGrid iPhone application:

• It is FREE to download
• You MUST have an active GoGrid account in order to use it
• It requires a network connection
• You MUST have an API key and secret configured within your GoGrid account (I recommend using a “Super User” role for this)
• You can configure multiple API keys (e.g., accounts) within the application
• It support API version 1.5 (we are working on an update to include the recently announced RAM scaling features and VM reclassification & description editing)
• It provides most all of the functionality available within the API (and you can even edit load balancers!)

So let’s dive into the application functionality.

Your Initial Setup

When you first launch the GoGrid application, you are asked to create an optional 4-digit pass code. This is recommended as it provides an additional layer of protection of your various GoGrid environments.

Once you create your pass code, you will be prompted to enter in a GoGrid account. In order to do this, you MUST have an API key and secret already set up within your GoGrid account. To do this, simply log into the GoGrid web portal (http://my.gogrid.com) and go to the API tab and create a new API key. After that, go back to the iPhone application and fill out the following screens to create your account.

Fill out the following fields:

• Account Name – this does not update anything on your GoGrid account and is merely a local name within the GoGrid iPhone application
• API key – get this from the GoGrid Web Portal
• API secret – get this from the GoGrid Web Portal

Once the API key and secret are validated (and note, you must have a network connection for this and other actions you do within the application), you will see it listed in the Accounts section. You can Edit as well as Add other accounts as needed now or in the future.

Select the Account you want to manage and click the Log In button. The “doors” will close and within a few seconds open again and you will have access to your GoGrid account.

Now on to the Management screens.

The Various Management Screens

There are a series of management screens available for you to control your GoGrid architecture. The screens are:

• My Cloud
  • Cloud Servers
  • Load Balancers
  • IP addresses
• Job History
• Account
• Settings & More

When you click on the “My Cloud” icon at the bottom bar, you can view your Cloud Servers, Load Balancers and IP Addresses. In the Cloud Servers screen, you can scroll through all of the GoGrid Cloud Servers you have currently deployed in our data centers:

If you flip the screen to the left, you see all of your Load Balancers:

Flipping one more time shows you all of the IP Addresses in your data centers that are either in use or available.

The Job History tab shows all of the events that has taken place within your GoGrid account. Items like creating or deleting objects or restarts will be displayed here.

The Account tab provides a snapshot of your current Billing Summary and your RAM and Bandwidth usage. You can also get the User Names and Passwords for your active servers further down this screen.

The Settings & More tab includes a variety of other non-cloud-management items.

So let’s dive into some of the functionality available within this application.

Cloud Servers

The GoGrid iPhone application provides you with the ability to:

• View all of your Cloud Servers including details of each server
• Create new Cloud Servers in various data centers
• Restart your server
• View Password information about your server
• Delete your server

The graphic below shows a listing of all active servers within your GoGrid account. You can scroll up and down to view the entire list.

Clicking on a specific server brings up all of the details of that server. Within this view, you can also Delete, Restart or view the User Names/Passwords associated with this server.

To create a new Cloud Server, simply click on the Add button at the top of the screen. Next, select the Data Center you want your new server to be located at:

Clicking the Next button will bring up a list of available Cloud Server images within that datacenter. Depending on the datacenter, you will see a list of available GoGrid base server images, Partner Server Images (PGSIs) or your own Personal Server Images (MyGSIs).

Note, you can also Filter the list of images by clicking on the Filter button.

Now, click on the Server Image that you desire. Details (including any associated additional cost) is presented:

Click Next to continue. The next screen contains the Server Details. Here you enter the Name of the server, a brief Description and then select the IP address and RAM allocation for your server.

Clicking on the IP address field bring up a selector of available IP addresses in your GoGrid Account for that data center:

Similarly, you select the amount of RAM you would like your server to have from the available options presented.

Once you have filled out the Server Details form, click Finish create your Cloud Server. The new server request will be then queued for deployment (and you can see the request under the Job History tab discussed later).

Load Balancers

Similar to the management of Cloud Servers, you can also manage the Load Balancers within your GoGrid environment. You have the ability to:

Flipping from the Cloud Server section of My Cloud to the Load Balancer section presents you with a listing of your active Load Balancers. Here, like with the Cloud Server section, you can scroll up or down to see all of your Load Balancers:

Clicking on a Load Balancer brings up the details of that specific Load Balancer.

Clicking on the Delete button at the bottom will delete the Load Balancer. Clicking on the IP List will show all of the IP addresses that are bound to that Load Balancer (e.g., the IP addresses of other servers in your GoGrid network):

To Create a new load balancer, be sure that you are NOT in the detail view of a Load Balancer. You need to be in the general listing of Load Balancers and you will see the Add button at the top. Click Add to start the process. First you select the data center where you want your Load Balancer to reside:

Then you fill out the Details of that load balancer including the Name, brief Description, Virtual IP address of the LB, the port that you want the traffic at, the Connection Type and then the Persistence.

Choose the Type of Load Balancing you want (Least Connect or Round Robin):

And then the Persistence (None, Source Address or SSL Sticky):

Click the Next button to enter in the Real IP addresses of the servers you want the traffic to go to. First click on the Real IPs box to bring up a list of IP addresses to choose from. These could be IP addresses that are either available (e.g., not tied to server) or in use (used by a server). Then click on the Port field and enter the port number for that IP address. Finally click the Add (+) button to add that IP address and Port to the Load Balancer.

You can add multiple IP addresses and ports to the load balancer. When you are completed, click the Finish button and your load balancer will be queued for creation.

In the Job History tab, you can see the Load Balancer’s creation status.

If you want to edit a load balancer, simply click on the load balancer you want to edit. When you see the details, you will see the Edit button at the top of the screen:

The process to Edit the load balancer is much like that of creating a new load balancer so please follow those steps.

IP Addresses

The IP Addresses section of the My Cloud lists out all of the IP addresses that are either In Use or Available for you to use within your GoGrid infrastructure. As with the Load Balancers and Cloud Servers section, you can scroll up and down through the listing.

Clicking on a specific IP Address provides you with additional details.

You can also Filter your IP addresses by Data Center and whether they are In Use or Available.

Job History

To the right of the My Cloud tab is the Job History tab. This contains a running history of all actions (and states – represented by the color dots – green, yellow and red) that have taken place on objects (e.g., Load Balancers, Cloud Servers, Cloud Storage, Account, etc.) within your GoGrid Cloud.

Clicking on a specific Job or Event will bring up details about that event:

And clicking on the Show Timeline will give you the details of that particular event.

You can also Filter events by Type, Date and Status.

Filtering will produce a subset of results.

Account

The Account tab gives you insight into the Usage on your account as well as provides the details of Users Names & Passwords that are also shown in your GoGrid portal. For example, you create a new server using the GoGrid iPhone Application, the User Name and Password for that server will appear within this section (as it is done automatically when servers are created).

Shown above is the Billing Summary which is the same as the billing widget that currently resides within the GoGrid web portal. In it you can see:

• Your Billing Cycle
• Amount of RAM currently allocated in your Plan (if you are on a Volume Discount plan)
• The amount of RAM currently in use
• The amount of GB hours used to date in your billing cycle
• Your Transfer allotment based on your Plan (if on a Volume Discount plan)
• The GBs of data transfer used to date in your billing cycle

Under the Password section, you can click through to passwords by server name. Viewing the details of the server shows the IP address, User Name and Password. These fields can be copied by simply clicking on them. This is useful if you need to send someone the server credentials via SMS or email.

Settings & More

This is sort of the catch-all section of the application with a lot of items that do not directly interface with your GoGrid account.

Here you can:

• Change the Password of your GoGrid iPhone application
• Add, Edit or Delete GoGrid accounts managed on your iPhone application
• Submit a questions or issue related to the GoGrid iPhone application
• Contact GoGrid Support on questions related to your GoGrid account (NOT the iPhone application)
• Read About GoGrid (but you already know a lot about us if you are using this application)
• View mobile versions of our Twitter and Facebook accounts
• View the mobile version of the GoGrid blog
• View our current Service Level Agreement (SLA) – note, the iPhone Application is NOT covered by our SLA currently
• View information about the application developer (flaka.soft)

So, What Do You Think?

A lot of hours were spent on the design and development of the GoGrid iPhone application. It was our desire to create a simple yet powerful solution for GoGrid users to control their infrastructure running on GoGrid. Being able to command your GoGrid infrastructure on the go from wherever you are gives IT professionals, sysadmins and developers an added level of convenience and security.

This was an important personal project of mine as well, so much so that at the beginning of the year, I flat out told our CEO that if we did not have an iPhone application by the end of 2010, I would quit! (I guess I will be sticking around for a while now!) Being able to provide management tools to GoGrid users (e.g., award-winning Web Portal, API and now iPhone application) makes their lives easier and being able to fully control their GoGrid cloud on the go, where ever they are, is truly compelling and paramount to a successful cloud service.

If you are a GoGrid user, be sure to download the GoGrid iPhone application from iTunes NOW! Let us know what you think and if you like it, be sure to give us some ratings and write a review in iTunes!

One of the most powerful aspects of Cloud Computing is the ability to scale your infrastructure. But did you know that there are two components to scalability, horizontal and vertical. GoGrid has been offering easy horizontal scaling since we launched.

So what is scaling and how are you able to do this with GoGrid. Let’s break it down with a quick, high-level definition and then show you how you can do it on GoGrid

What is Scaling?

Horizontal scaling simply means the ability to expand your infrastructure out, for example, adding additional servers to your infrastructure. You can currently do this using the GoGrid web portal or API or even using one of the solutions offered by our partners in the GoGrid Exchange. Similarly, if you use our MyGSI feature to create a Golden Master of your server, you can quickly scale out vertically with cloned instances of that MyGSI. Conversely, you can also scale your infrastructure back by removing servers from the mix.

Vertical scaling means that you can add additional resources to your individual infrastructure components, for example, adding addition RAM or cores to a server.

How To Scale Your RAM on GoGrid

So, how do you scale your infrastructure on GoGrid? As I mentioned, you’ve always been able to horizontally scale your infrastructure and now we are pleased to announce the availability that you can vertically scale using our new RAM Scaling feature. GoGrid customers can now scale the RAM up or down on GoGrid Cloud Servers within their existing and new infrastructure in the GoGrid cloud.

At GoGrid, it is our goal to live up to the phrase “Complex Infrastructure Made Easy™“, so we have designed our RAM Scaling feature to be as easy to use as possible.

For starters, the RAM Scaling feature is backwards compatible, meaning that you will have the ability to scale your GoGrid Cloud Server RAM on your existing infrastructure. You can increase as well as decrease the amount of RAM allocated to a particular Cloud Server Instance. An important point to note prior to diving into the details is that there is a “minimum” threshold amount that is set to the original amount of RAM you selected when you first created your Cloud Server. However, you have the ability to scale the RAM up to a larger amount (if available) and then back down to that original level.

Below is an example of how the RAM scaling works. In this case, I started with a server that had 512 MBs of RAM (the original configuration). I then scaled it up to 4 GBs and then back down to 2 GBs of RAM. Note that throughout the process, I always have the ability to scale back to the original RAM allocation.

Once the Cloud Server is available, you can see its original configuration by holding your mouse over the server.

You can also see the server creation history in the Job History tab:

Let’s take a look at the process involved in upgrading the server to have 4 GBs of RAM. First, you click on the Cloud Server you would like to upgrade and you will not a new icon in the task menu:

Simply click on the “Upgrade” icon and you will be presented with your RAM scaling choices. As mentioned above, your minimum RAM options is the amount of RAM the server was originally spun up with. Your maximum  RAM option is the maximum available for your OS. In this case, my server has a 32-bit OS and was originally created with 512 MB of RAM:

Select the new amount of RAM you want allocated to that particular server and click “Submit”. Within 5 minutes or less, your server will have the new allocation in effect. In some cases, the RAM scaling process may take as long as 30 minutes. Below is the updated server:

If your server is powered up with you click “Submit”, it will be gracefully shut down and then restarted, so please be sure that you have already shut down any running processes on your server directly. If the server is powered down, it will remain shut down after upgrading. You can always view the status within the Job History tab:

Conversely, if you want to scale your Cloud Server’s RAM down, you would go through the same process of selecting the server, clicking the “Upgrade” icon and choosing a lesser value of RAM. You can scale it back down to the original creation allocation (in the example above, that would be 512 MB).

You can also perform RAM scaling within the List view by selecting the server you want and clicking the “Upgrade RAM” link at the top of the list:

Hopefully you can see what a powerful feature this is for your GoGrid cloud. It enables you, on demand, to instantly add RAM to your RAM-hungry environments. But it also gives you a way to “upgrade” your existing infrastructure.

Some things to note:

• The Scalability is ONLY for RAM. It does NOT affect your Hard Disk size nor your CPU/Core allotments
• You CANNOT scale below the original amount that your server was configured
• The functionality is FULLY SUPPORTED via the GoGrid API
• Be sure to power your server down or prepare your server for a graceful shutdown by stopping or ending any running applications or processes.

Other Changes in this Release

In addition to the important RAM scaling feature, we also released the following enhancements:

• Edit Server Description via API – using a simple API call, you can now fully edit the description of your GoGrid Cloud Server. See the API documentation on how to do this.
• Change Cloud Server Classification via API – you can now change the server classification via the GoGrid API. Options are: Web/App Server or Database Server. This will affect where your Cloud Server appears in both the Grid and List views. See the API documentation on how to do this.
• More Details about Cloud Servers – you can, in addition to RAM, IP address, and OS, now see the number of Cores and Disk Space of your servers. This is true on the Grid view and List views:
  
  
• Minor Redesign to the Tool Bar in the List view

We believe that with this release, GoGrid continues to show leadership within the Cloud Infrastructure Hosting space. If you have suggestions or other features that you would like to see implemented, please leave a comment to this post.

GoGrid has long been supporter of open standards and the open source movement. We recently promoted how many open source solution providers are leveraging GoGrid as a platform to disseminate their open source solutions and technology in the cloud. Long before that at the beginning of 2009, we made our public API available to the public under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License. This meant that under this licensing, developers could “share, distribute, display and perform the work” as well as “make derivative works” based on our API.

Now we are taking it one step further because we realize in order for Cloud Computing to be adopted across the business IT landscape, there needs to be more standards put in place as well as a commonality across the board when it comes to Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The Deltacloud initiative is grabbing this issue by the horns by working to combine interoperability with an open sourced API. And, they are the only major cloud framework that isn’t leveraging a single company’s proprietary code, API or intellectual property.

Deltacloud, an Apache Software Foundation incubator project that provides an open set of application programming interfaces (APIs) to enable computing interoperability across private and public clouds, recently announced support for GoGrid and we are pleased to participate in this important initiative. There are quite a few advantages of this effort, specifically:

• The API can be offered by a cloud provider or individual user running their own server
• Multiple client libraries can be written in a variety of computer languages (many are already available)
• The core API logic resides on the API server, allowing consistent behavior across all client libraries
• New cloud providers can be added to the API without needing to change the clients

The driver for GoGrid is currently under development but will support the following actions:

• Create new instances
• Stop running instances
• Reboot running instances
• Destroy instances
• List all/get details about hardware profiles
• List all/get details about realms
• List all/get details about images
• List all/get details about instances

Deltacloud is hosted at Apache incubator which allows it to benefit from the Apache governance model. This means that discussion, changes and updates are based on individual contributions.

For more information on the Deltacloud initiative, please visit the project hosted on the Apache incubator site.

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:

• Who and What is GoGrid?
• The GoGrid Portal
• The GoGrid API
• The Anatomy of a GoGrid API Call
• A Sample API Request
• Sample Code
• GoGrid API Objects & Actions
• Challenges in Developing
• Who is the API for?

The full presentation is also available below:

If you are interested in how the GoGrid API works, I encourage you to look at the GoGrid Wiki where you can find the “Getting Started Guide” as well as the following items:

• Anatomy of GoGrid API Call
• Common API Call Patterns
• API Frequently Asked Questions
• API Libraries and Tools
• Download a GoGrid API Quick Reference Guide
• API Version Log

Also, I’m personally curious to find out if and how you are using the GoGrid API. Have you created a program to hook into our API to control scaling or deployment of servers? What about creating your own interface to our service? Please leave a comment and let me know!

A couple of weeks ago we released a new version of GoGrid which included a variety of exciting enhancements and features. Most notable are:

• GoGrid Dedicated Servers
• List View of GoGrid Objects
• Edit F5 Load Balancers via the API
• New Login Page
• Self Service Support Links

More details about these features can be found on the following GoGrid blog post. For a quick overview of the new features in the form of a screencast, please watch the video below. I quickly cover many of the items listed above including:

• Walking through the new login page
• Deploying a GoGrid Dedicated Server
• Overview of the new GoGrid List View
• Dedicated Servers showing in the Jobs Tab
• Showing of Self-Service Links in the portal
• Editing Load Balancers using the GoGrid API

If you have more questions about these new GoGrid features, I recommend that you attend our webinar (on February 24, 2010) where you can get more information about this important release. Be sure to register for the webinar and come prepared with questions!