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Creating your own Images

As a continuation of the blog post about snapshots, in this post I’m going to talk about the new image capabilities in FlexiScale 2.0.

Images are pre-built disk configurations that are either global (published by us and available to all users), or user-defined images which are private to each customer. In other cloud platforms, building your own images can be a complicated and time consuming experience. With FlexiScale, it couldn’t be easier. Here’s the simplest way to create an image:

1) Create a new server based on the OS you want;

2) Configure this server to your exact requirements;

3) Shut down the server;

4) Go to the “Images” tab, and click “Create New Image”

5) Select the disk you’ve just configured (click on the screenshots below to expand them);

6) Within a few seconds it’s ready to use. (See Screenshot below)

7) Your new image will appear in the ‘Create Server’ page alongside your other choices; from there you can create as many servers using that image as you need, just as you would with one of our standard images.

8 ) That’s it. It really is that simple. Sign up now to try it yourself!

Advanced Usage

If you already have disks or images elsewhere you would like to use, that’s just as easy; a blog post explaining this will appear in the next few days. You can also create an image by installing an operating system to a blank disk (perhaps a secondary disk attached to an existing server). I’ll also explain in a further post how to take advantage of our “first boot” system, and make an image that sets an initial user name and password.

One of the new features we have been looking forward to the most in FlexiScale 2.0 is the new disk management functionality. There are so many new features in this area alone that we’ve had to split them across three blog posts.

Taking Snapshots

First up is new snapshots. You can now take a snapshot of any disk of any of your server at any time, even when it’s running (although as data may be ‘in flight’, if you need a fully consistent snapshot, you are better doing it when the server is stopped).

With a couple of clicks in the UI, you can take a snapshot of any server, and then store it for as long as you need. You can even revert a disk back to a previous snapshot at any point. How’s that for rollback management?

It’s that simple. No having to mess around with uploads and downloads, bundling packages or command line instructions. Just a couple of clicks and you are done!

So what use is that I hear you ask, well, it has two great use cases, both of which can save you time and especially in the case of this first use case, can solve some very nasty headaches.

Reverting Snapshots

So you want to delete all files beginning with ‘a’.  You type ‘rm -rf a *‘. Aaargghh, you meant ‘rm -rf a*‘.  You’ve now wiped out all the files in that directory.  Panic stations! You grab the backup, but – oops – it’s out of date, failed to run, corrupted, going to take hours, or perhaps all of the above.

Now consider what would happen had you taken regular snapshots of your disk using our API or UI, which you can do while the machine is still running.  If you need to roll back to a previous snapshot at any point, it’s as simple as shutting the machine down, clicking ‘revert’ next to the snapshot you want to roll back to, and starting the machine back up again.

No more panics, no more late nights restoring data or weird configurations that can only be made to work if there is a full moon and the wind is blowing in the right direction, just revert back and you are all fixed.

Quite amusingly, to test this I deliberately trashed a box of mine I had done several hours work on, which I would have lost, so you can be sure it works very well indeed!

If you want to avoid doing a complete rollback, you can clone the snapshot onto a second disk (see below), attach that to your server, and just restore the directory concerned. Which neatly brings us to…

Cloning Snapshots

If you want to do a one-time clone of an existing server or disk, it’s as simple as taking a snapshot from the original server and then cloning the snapshot into a brand new server or disk.

This appears as a clone to let you know it’s related to the existing disk, but also appears in your standard disk listings as well.

More information on all the other disk management functionality in the next post!

Tony @tonylucas on Twitter.

Something you may not have spotted yet in the new UI is direct integration of Console access to your server. Never again do you have to sit there scratching your head if a server fails to boot. You can log directly onto its console, regardless of OS. You will then be able to fix whatever needs fixing and easily bring your server back online.

Using the Console

You can access this by clicking on the ‘Open Console’ link, on the right hand side of the ‘Manage Server’ page when your server is running. (Click on the screenshots below to enlarge them).

The Console with a Linux Server

The Console with a Windows Server

When you have finished using it, just close the window and it will automatically disable the console until you need it again.

Although it is that simple to use, rest assured there are multiple security safeguards in place to ensure that your server isn’t exposed in any way.

You will need Java to use the Console, but the vast majority of people should have that installed already.

Hopefully you find this useful, please let us know!

Tony @tonylucas on Twitter

VDC’s

One of the key new features we are exposing in FlexiScale 2.0 is the concept of a virtual data centre (or VDC for short). A VDC allows you to group a set of resources together in a logical way. Resources include:

• Servers
• Disks
• Images
• IP Addresses
• Snapshots
• Clones
• VLANs
• Virtual NICs

You can set your display to show you data from all VDCs, or just filter it to the one you are currently working with.

Below is a screenshot of a list of Servers across VDC’s (click on the screenshot to enlarge it).

Organising resources

For this release of FlexiScale, we’ve only enabled a portion of our VDC functionality. Currently, VDCs are mainly there to help you arrange resources in a logical way.This  can be an enormous help when you have servers spread across staging, live & development architectures. You can create as many VDCs as you need, and you can move disks them between them if required.

Future Development

Soon we will release a whole raft of additional functionality around VDCs, including usage reporting on bandwidth, disk, CPU etc. on a per VDC basis, and best of all, the ability to start, stop, clone or delete an entire VDC – no matter how many servers are within it; and all in one click or API call!

Imagine being able to roll out an entirely new staging platform, straight from your development environment, with a complex configuration, spread across 20, 50, or 100 servers, in one click. Now that’s power!

As always, let us know what you think, we really appreciate feedback, good or bad – good is nicer to get, bad tends to be more useful to us in product development!

Tony @tonylucas on Twitter

As part of the release of FlexiScale 2.0 we have developed a brand new user interface. In this post I’m going to briefly take you through the key parts of it. I’ll be following up in a lot more detail in subsequent posts.

FlexiScale 2.0 in Action

You’ll quickly notice it’s nothing like the old interface. I think we can all agree that is probably a good thing!

The really neat thing about the UI though is that apart from the billing section, it’s completely built using our own public API, so any interaction you can do through the UI, you could also integrate directly with your own systems if required.

Tabs

No, I’m not talking about our Operations Manager (Tabs Sharif for those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of meeting him yet), I’m talking about the different tabs across the top of the screen.

There are a number of key tabs in the interface, one for each of the main types of resource that FlexiScale manages. You can use each tab to manage and manipulate that reasource to your hearts content.

The key one to explain here is the first one: VDCs, short for Virtual Data Centres,  this enables you conveniently to group all your resources together in easy to manage locations.  For example you could have Development, Staging & Live VDCs, all easily manageable from within the same interface.  This allows you to logically separate different resources for your convenience.

The next tabs are each related to particular types of resource:

• Servers
• Disks
• Snapshots
• Images
• Networks

Each tab allows you to dive right in to add, delete or modify the appropriate resource, allowing you incredible flexibility and speed in building and reconfiguring your set up. I will be covering each of these in more depth in blog posts over the next few days.  If you are curious to find out more before then, feel free to Signup!

Next comes the jobs tab. This is simply a log of the actions you have asked the system to perform (starting, stopping servers etc.)

Last but not least, there is the dashboard. At the moment the Dashboard is fairly basic from give you an overview of your servers, and the amount of credit you have remaining. So why is it there might you ask? As we continue to push releases out (and they will be coming out thick and fast now), this will be updated to give you all sorts of additional functionality and reporting services. On that note we’d love to know what you would like it to show, as the more feedback we get the better.

Settings

The settings pane allows you to change your contact details and your password. It also allows you to cancel your account (not that you would ever want to do that).

Billing

The billing pane shows you how your units have been used, and allows you to buy more units. If you’ve purchased an “auto-topup” package of units (one that automatically charges your credit card when your units balance gets low), you can cancel that facility here. You can also retrieve copies of your invoices from here.

Support

Click on here to get access to our new integrated ticket system.

We want your feedback

Let us know what you think of the new UI. Love it, hate it, or even prefer the old one (we can recommend a good medical practitioner)? Whatever the case, we’d love to know.

Until next time…..

Tony @tonylucas on Twitter

Ok, so by now you have hopefully seen the press release here.

What the press release doesn’t tell you however, is how excited we are that this release is finally out.  To us it’s so game changing that it’s almost as significant as the very first release we did, back in 2007.

Key new features include:

• A brand new UI (we are very very proud of this, so please let us know what you think);
• A substantially richer API (we have tripled the number of API Calls);
• Significantly reduced charges (we aren’t kidding either, some prices dropped as much as 84%);
• Highly accelerated initial boot times (create & deploy servers in one minute flat);
• Virtual Data Centers to enable customers to organise their own array of servers;
• Ability for customers to attach, detach, resize, snapshot, image and clone virtual disks;
• Ability for customers to create their own servers from uploaded images; and
• VNC console support to diagnose boot or connectivity issues.

If you are a FlexiScale 1.x user, you just have to try out the 2.0 beta service. It’s a huge leap forward.

To test this out, sign up here. We are really interested in your views, so if you have feedback (whether positive or negative), feel free to either comment below, put it in a ticket (use the Support link at the top), or email us at support@flexiscale.com. Being a beta test, we know that there are a few rough edges, and a small number of areas of functionality have been disabled as we haven’t got them fully working to our complete satisfaction yet. You should thus see changes every day.

Once we have removed the beta tag, we plan to do incremental releases far more frequently than we have done to date. So please check back here for new features. I’ll also be blogging further on the changes in FlexiScale 2.0. Watch this space.

Tony, @tonylucas on Twitter