RightScale
I’ve blogged in the past about RightScale when talking about managing your Amazon EC2 instances. They have a nice platform and developers can get a free account with limited services to get your feet wet in the service. I have such an account and have launched a few servers with it. I wasn’t setting my ports to open correctly, so I couldn’t connect to it via SSH or HTTP, but that’s my fault, not RightScale’s.
Yesterday, when talking about Amazon’s various announcements, I called Rightscale “expensive.” I’d like to clarify that a bit. In my position as a web development manager at a small, liberal-arts college, RightScale looks, at first glance, expensive. But, if you were a small or medium sized business who was migrating a lot of services towards AWS and EC2, a solution like RightScale makes a lot of sense, and in that scenario, is really quite affordable. Being able to quickly and easily scale up and down your server instances is probably worth the price of admission alone. But mostly, it’s takes a large amount of the work out of managing, maintaining and scaling your EC2 based servers. That’s something you can directly look at and see the ROI, in terms of staff time, up or down time and other infrastructure resources.
I got an email yesterday from the CTO of Rightscale, and I’ve asked if I can send him some questions to answer about RightScale, higher education usage and more.
If you enjoyed this post, please subscribe to my RSS feed!
Wordpress 2.6.3 released
Wordpress 2.6.3 is now available for download. If you use Wordpress as your blogging software or CMS, you should upgrade. Older versions of Wordpress are often the ones that are hacked, so you should always keep your software up to date.
I’d recommend the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin. I did the upgrade this morning in just a few minutes. I think this plugin should be merged with the Wordpress source code and be a regular feature for all users. That’d go a long way to stop spammers and hackers who exploit older and unprotected sites.
If you enjoyed this post, please subscribe to my RSS feed!
New Stuff at EC2
Dear Amazon,
If you need a higher ed evangelist, call me. I will take the job.
Yours,
Mike
Amazon announced some new changes to the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) product today. You can read more about there here but I wanted to highlight a few of the things I see as important.
1. EC2 is now out of beta.
2. There is now an SLA at EC2
3. Windows servers are now available
4. Microsoft SQL server is now available
5. Amazon will soon release a management console
6. They are going to release new load balancing, automatic scaling and monitoring services.
Let’s look at a few of these.
SLA
The SLA is big. I think that’s one of the reasons CIO in IHE’s are hesistant to move to services like these - they didn’t have iron-clad guarantees of uptime and availability. The SLA states each region (right now there’s one, but more are coming) will have 99.95% availability. Five nines it is not, but close.
AWS Management Console
Having a central spot to manage not only EC2 but S3 is GIGANTIC. I can’t stress how clutch this is. Let’s take EC2 as an example. You can manage your instances via a command line, but that’s a pain sometimes. You can use browser plug-ins like ElasticFox but they may not be developed or supported in the future, or tomorrow. If you have a lot of money, you can use a service like RightScale. RightScale does a lot of this stuff, but it’s expensive. Amazon building there own may be the killer app that will take this mainstream, especially if its web-based and easy to use.
Load balancing, automatic scaling, and cloud monitoring services
Again, these tools will make managing your cloud services at Amazon much easier and more user-friendly. Details on these items are scant at the moment, but hopefully they won’t be kept from us much longer.
The other interesting bit of cloud news today is that Rackspace has purchased JungleDisk as well as Slicehost. I’ve been JungleDisk for awhile now and have been very happy with it. JungleDisk manages and automates your backups to Amazon’s S3. JungleDisk will allow users to stay with S3, but I imagine they will also give users the option of using one of Rackspace’s services as well. Stay tuned.
If you enjoyed this post, please subscribe to my RSS feed!
