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.
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
This week, GoGrid was not only an exhibitor and Silver Sponsor of theCloud 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.
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:
Today, the team at GoGrid is pleased to announce several new enhancements and features to our Cloud Infrastructure Hosting service. With us, it is all about trying to make our Cloud offering as powerful as possible. To that end, we have released our latest version of GoGrid, available now! Some highlights include (each of which I will go into further details later on in this post):
GoGrid Dedicated Servers
List View of GoGrid Objects
Edit f5 Load Balancers
New Login Page
Self-Service Support Links
Other Items
We hope that you share our excitement about this release! Now, let’s get into the details. Also be sure to see our video that talks about many of the items listed here (Available on GoGrid YouTube channel and the GoGrid Facebook Fan Page as well.)
GoGrid Dedicated Servers
Let’s face it, we have been doing dedicated hosting for over 8 years so we do know a little bit about it. Last year, we introduced a first-to-market service that we internally called “Hybrid Hosting” which allowed users to connect GoGrid cloud infrastructure with a separate dedicated infrastructure, all within a private network. This proved to be incredibly successful, and something that many of our customers had desired. So, we decided to take it to the next level by offering Dedicated Servers within the GoGrid infrastructure.
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