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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Today art of defence and GoGrid announced the availability of the Industry’s first Distributed Web Application Firewall running within the GoGrid cloud. This is a cloud-based SaaS (Software as a Service) solution called hyperguard™ and can be easily and quickly deployed using a GoGrid Partner Server Image (GSI). By using a GoGrid Server Image running art of defence’s hyperguard SaaS, customers can be assured that they are receiving robust application-level protection beyond simply the network layer within their cloud environment.

By deploying the hyperguard-enabled GoGrid Server Image, GoGrid users simply have to configure their applications and their respective protection levels through hyperguard’s web-base GUI which allows for comprehensive attack detection and protection at the Web Application layer. hyperguard SaaS basic (which is currently available on GoGrid for $39/mo/server plus associated GoGrid RAM/Bandwidth costs) offers web application security monitoring, detection-only and protection modes.

Hyperguard SaaS Standard dWAF provides the following key capabilities:

• Security monitoring at the application layer of attacks like SQL-injection, cross site scripting and OWASP Top10 for all applications delivered on the hyperguard web server GSI
• Comprehensive baseline protection against known attacks at the application layer – only if rule sets are run in protection mode
• Automated updates of baseline protection rule sets by art of defence – with testing capability for these new rule sets via detect-only mode

The GoGrid Server Image is available now through GoGrid:

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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

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Today we sent out the January 2010 GoGrid Customer Update to all GoGrid customers. We wanted to ensure that all people who are interested in GoGrid have access to the latest and greatest information coming from our headquarters so the full newsletter is posted below. If you want to get regular updates similar to this newsletter, I recommend that you subscribe to the GoGrid blog RSS feed, subscribe to blog post via email, follow us on Twitter (@GoGrid) as well as become a GoGrid Facebook Fanpage.

Below is the entire GoGrid Newsletter (January 2010):

Hello Michael,

On behalf of everyone here at GoGrid, I want to wish you a very successful 2010!  We are starting the year off with a bang that includes some exciting new developments that I want to share with you in this edition of the GoGrid Newsletter.  Here are the specific topics:

1. New Features and System Enhancements
2. GoGrid CDN: New Singapore and Paris Points of Presence (POPs)
3. New Partner GSIs
4. Preventative Power Maintenance
5. End-of-Life: CentOS 5.1 w/Apache &  RHEL 5.1 w/Apache operating systems
6. New CentOS 5.3 & RHEL 5.4 base operating systems
7. Two New 3rd Party Services to Monitor your GoGrid Servers
8. Hosting for Haiti

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Yesterday, CloudKick announced that they have officially come out of beta and is rolling out a freemium model for their server management and monitoring service. With the announcement, CloudKick also officially launched support of the GoGrid Cloud in its management, alerting, graphing and monitoring suite.

CloudKick offers a variety of robust services to help you quickly and easily gain insight into your infrastructure hosted on GoGrid. Some services and features include:

• Monitor critical metrics
• Simple management tools
• Flexible alerting to multiple addresses including SMS
• Visualize performance data
• Multiple users
• Changelog tool
• CloudKick agent

Depending on the plan that you are on (they range from free to $599+ a month), you get a variety of services mentioned above. The difference in plans depend on the number of servers, users, data retention, alerts and the type of support you desire.

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I guess that I’m a bit late in the game here to throw my predictions into the clouds but late is better than never, right? It has been an exciting year for us here at GoGrid. We had many stellar and innovative announcements which you can read about here. Before I quickly go into some of my thoughts for 2010, it makes sense to see how well I did for 2009. My original predictions were here and were as follows (coupled with a quick analysis).

1. Cloud Reduce the Effect of the Recession – Businesses definitely did not spend as much last year, however, the interest in the cloud as a financially viable way to “survive” gained traction throughout the year. All major cloud providers (including GoGrid) showed growth during the year despite the recession.
2. Broader Depth of Clouds – the cloud continued to grow throughout the year. More smaller and larger players jumped into the mix. The relative “unknown” of the cloud began to become much clearer.
3. VC’s, Money & Long Term Viability – hard to gauge this one without knowing what VC’s were investing in. But given the strength of leaders like AWS, Rackspace and GoGrid and the continued development therein, the long term viability seemed solid.
4. Partnerships Galore & Weeding Out of Providers – As is evident with GoGrid’s growing partner list, this is really where the marketplace was expanding. Partners bring subject-matter expertise to the cloud, allowing for medium to large providers to focus on their core competencies. There were not big failures of providers during 2009 but the shakeout may start in 2010.
5. Hybrid Solutions – we continued to lead the way with robust hybrid solutions in the form of cloud front-ends coupled with physical back-end server. Not too many other providers announced things similar, but I believe these will materialize this year.
6. Web 3.0 – the “social web” definitely took off this year, as did the whole (vague) concept of data being “in the cloud”. Web 3.0 wasn’t officially announced but there were definitely lots of companies mashing up their services/data in unique, new offerings.
7. Standards and Interoperability – many separate groups continued to work towards open standards and interoperability with definite progress being made. Unfortunately, these groups are still splintered with individuals and companies working towards their own agenda.
8. Staggered Growth within the Cloud – the big players continued to get bigger, leaving some of the smaller or non-visionary thinkers a bit behind. More users started looking away from shared hosting and more towards the cloud for solutions. Smaller startups continued to advance using the cloud to power their infrastructure with the enterprise still testing the waters or using the cloud sporadically.
9. Technology Advances at the Cloud Molecular Level – chip manufacturers and computer/server vendors did announce chipsets and systems optimized for the cloud.
10. Larger Adoption – still not as fast as I expected, but the fact that the Federal (and State) governments were (and are) putting some serious thought and development work around cloud computing shows that adoption is growing across the board.

Just quickly scanning through my “results” shows that I wasn’t too off track. Some items faired a bit better than others but for the most part my “predictions” were fairly close. So what about 2010? Here’s what I’m thinking:

1. Cloud Outages – There will be several Cloud Outages that get high visibility this year. As complexity and associated infrastructure grows and more users turn toward the cloud, any hiccups therein will receive quick and broad media coverage, with naysayers quickly stating “I told you so”. Unfortunately, any type of outage may be perceived as a “cloud failure”, resulting in the masses becoming increasingly doubtful in the reliability of the cloud. This “F.U.D. Factor” will be a steep hurdle that cloud providers and partners will have to overcome. Those companies with sound IT strategies and best practices in place will be able to weather any outages well, assuming they employ Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions and have them implemented.
2. The Rise of Hybrid Hosting Solutions – While relatively new in 2009, more providers will consider implementing the ability to have the “best of all worlds” hosting solutions. Whether this be the combination of physical and cloud environments or, cloud bursting, or private and public clouds working congruently, there will definitely be a blurring of lines between what hosting is.
3. Security Concerns, Vulnerabilities and Malware – this is an only logical prediction. As the number of cloud or virtualized environments increase due to their ease of use and lower cost, the possibility of environments being created and left unattended also increases. Also because of the ease of use, with “average” users deploying environments that are not hardened or at least audited from a security standpoint, there are more possibilities for hackers or users to unintentionally open their systems up to malware, botnets or other malicious code.
4. A “Cloud” for Everyone – Towards the end of last year, we started to see a blurring of the definition of “cloud” and “cloud computing”. The mainstream media is to blame for much of this confusion. To that end, people seem to be ubiquitously interchanging the word “cloud” and “cloud computing” where they are actually quite different. Most people are simply using the word “cloud” to describe anything where the data is stored somewhere else, whether it be truly using a “cloud computing” environment or simply a cluster of servers somewhere. I predict that this confusion will get worse long before it gets better. People will continue to interchangeably use “cloud” and “cloud computing” thus forcing those of us in the industry to (re)define what “cloud computing” truly is. However, as the word “cloud” becomes incredibly mainstream, it will grow to mean anything that is delivered via the web, regardless of if it is applications, services, infrastructure, data or what have you. (In fact, I used “cloud” interchangeably throughout this post…for me, I’m talking about “cloud computing.”)
5. Analysts will Shorten their “Coming of Age” Stories – Many of the big name players predicted that cloud computing wouldn’t really be adopted by the mainstream for another few years. I believe that they will retract or refine their statements to show how much closer to mainstream cloud computing really is. While Fortune100 companies may still be slow to adopt, the “rest of us” will get on the cloud a lot faster than analysts originally predicted.

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Sometimes it is important to reflect back on activities and achievements of the past year in order to focus on the road ahead. 2009 was a year full of “firsts” and exciting announcements for GoGrid and I thought that I would quickly summarize and highlight a some blog posts of interest.

I have personally enjoyed documenting our achievements, analyzing trends, reviewing opportunities, showcasing new clients and partners as well as musing about Cloud Computing in general. Much of the writing on the GoGrid blog during 2009 was my own, however, the people who have helped provide me inspiration are countless, ranging from those within GoGrid to others creating the cloud community at large.

The journey through 2009 has definitely been an exciting one. Looking back on 2009 should make all users, creators and consumers of the cloud very proud. We have done a tremendous amount in 2009! So without further ado, below are a few selected posts of interest from the GoGrid blog for each month during 2009.

January 2009

• “Cloudcenters Are Datacenters In The Sky” – in this post, Randy Bias outlines his vision of what the “cloudcenter” meme truly is and how it is unique
• “Building A House In The Cloud – Cloudcenters Vs. Infrastructure Web Services” – in this post, I tried to simplify some of the differences between our new term of “cloudcenter” and “infrastructure web services” using a comparison to building a house.
• “GoGrid Releases API Specification To The Cloud Computing Community Under Creative Commons License” – GoGrid released our Application Programming Interface (API) under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 License which allows users to share, distribute, display and make derivative works based on our API
• “New Windows Server 2003 & 2008 Images Added To GoGrid” – we continued to build out our Windows Server 2003 and 2008 image offering as the first to market with Windows Server 2008 in the Cloud
• All January posts are here

February 2009 (more…)

Introduction to Partner Server Images

A few months ago, we introduced MyGSIs (personal server images) which allow users to create custom personal GSI (GoGrid Server Images) with all of their code, applications and data. These personal server images are then compressed and stored in GoGrid’s Cloud Storage for use later instantiating copies of those MyGSIs within a user’s GoGrid cloud. Building upon that framework, backend structure and concept, we have released Partner GSIs and the GoGrid Exchange.

A Partner GSI appears in the same list of servers or sandboxes available for deployment. GoGrid has a growing number of partners, each of which specialize in a variety of capabilities including internet security, backup, monitoring, web applications, compliance and application scaling. New partners are being added regularly so be sure to check the GoGrid Partner page for additions. Also, a new “microsite”, called the GoGrid Exchange, will be launching shortly where you can get detailed information about Partners and the images they are providing.

To use a Partner GSI, simply select it from the server list as you are creating a new GoGrid cloud server. Do note that some partners charge an additional amount for using their pre-packaged GSI. If you use a Partner GSI that has some sort of “token based billing” attached to it, you will receive a charge for the use of that server in your next billing statement. Also, even if you use a Partner GSI that has a billing token assigned to it for an hour (or more), you are charged the full amount associated with that image. There is no partial or fractional billing for Partner GSIs. Partner images will show a different “owner” (see the screenshot below).

GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform (XAP)

GigaSpaces (XAP) is now available as a PartnerGSI. This high-end application server is designed to meet the most demanding business requirements in a cost-effective manner and is the only product that provides a complete middleware solution on a single, scalable platform. XAP is trusted by Fortune 100 companies, which leverage it as a strategic solution that enhances efficiency and agility across the IT organization. Look for it in the GoGrid catalog. Below is a screenshot that shows the available GigaSpaces images currently available on GoGrid:

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Just in time for the Microsoft PDC 2009, GoGrid is excited to showcase an integrated solution for Windows Azure™ developers, using the GoGrid Cloud for seamlessly building and deploying applications for Windows Azure. Our solution interoperates with the existing GoGrid infrastructure and includes preconfigured development environments which allows developers to build applications and publish them to Windows Azure.

GoGrid’s VP of Engineering, Paul Lappas, narrates the video below demonstrating the interoperability between GoGrid Cloud Infrastructure and the Windows Azure Platform:

GoGrid provides infrastructure services in the cloud allowing customers to rapidly deploy load-balanced and hybrid servers without purchasing costly hardware.

With the release of the Windows Azure™ platform, GoGrid wanted to extend its services and enable its customers to develop, test, deploy, and back up Windows Azure applications efficiently and cost-effectively.

The Windows Azure Application Lifecycle Management Service interoperates with the existing GoGrid infrastructure. With this pairing, Windows Developers enjoy a variety of advantages. For example:

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Last week, we released a new version of GoGrid which includes new RAM Hour and Bandwidth Pricing Plans, included larger volume discounts. Further details of this released covered in this post are:

• New RAM Hour and Bandwidth Pricing Plans
• New Linux & Windows Base Images
• Behind-the-scenes Performance Improvements

Read on for more details.

New RAM Hour and Bandwidth Pricing Plans

With this release, we are also making some changes (for the better) on our pricing plans. Coupled with this, we have now made it even easier to upgrade (or downgrade) your plans from within the GoGrid portal.

These new plans are listed below:

Server RAM Hours

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