Ok, my last post was a little long, so I’ll try and keep this one slightly easier to read.
After coming up with the idea for what is now FlexiScale, we sat on it for about 18 months or so, because some of the key technologies we needed didn’t exist (Hardware based VT Support etc). Late 2005 we started examining the various technologies that were then becoming available (Xen etc), and then in early 2006 started work on building the platform.
At this point we were trying to build a ‘utility hosting platform’, rather than a computing platform, however as we built it, we realised it was capable of far more than just traditional hosting (e.g. you have a batch job of video conversion you want to do, that would normally take a week on your computing facilities in house, no problem, do it in a few hours with us!)
It’s easy to say that we have certainly had some significant challenges in this process, as we are breaking a lot of rules and boundaries of traditional computing requirements, but we’ve always had an attitude of ‘it isn’t a problem, it’s just a question we don’t know the answer to yet’.
To cut a (very) long story short, we’ve spent the last year building FlexiScale, and it’s now ready for full commercial deployment. Not all the functionality we want for the first iteration is up and running yet, but it should be in the next few weeks. As of next week though you will be able to deploy servers (and remove them again) as you require, either from our web based interface, or through our API, with an pre-defined golden image that we have built (and deploy them in under 1 minute!).
We currently have Windows 2003 Server Standard & CentOS 4.5 & we will be adding more as time goes on (and allowing people to add their own as well of course).
My next post will detail some of our future plans for the platform, over the coming 2-3 years.
Tony.
