One of our customers who has had a lot of constructive feedback for us, and has spent a lot of time playing around with FlexiScale functionality and the API has got a great blog post up at http://www.matchpeg.com/blog.asp  they have also released the various tools they have built along the way, including their own web based control system for FlexiScale, using our API.  These are available at http://www.matchpeg.com/brochure/misc/flexiscale.asp

I think the work they have done is brilliant, and we’re certainly looking at incorporating some of their ideas in our redesign of our web interface (which we know is inferior compared to the rest of the service) which will happen soon.

Tony.

This is a first for us at FlexiScale. Tony manages to get quoted in the Register during his participation in the Cloud discussion panel at Structure 08. There’ll be no dealing with that ego now

We’re sponsoring the beer and pizza at CloudCamp when it comes to London on July 16th 2008, so come along and join us in this free community event hosted by Skills Matter and our technology partners, CohesiveFT. Kick off is at 6:30pm and the event takes place in The Crypt, Clerkenwell Green (apparently a popular location for tango lessons at weekends). Hear what other people are doing with FlexiScale, Google AppEngine, Amazon EC2 and other clouds. Bring your laptop and show the folks your cloud application. Beer and pizza will be provided for all

This is great timing. Just as Tony is flying to San Francisco to take part in the Structure 08 Panel discussion on Cloud Computing, we have a big announcement to make.

As of today we are entering with CohesiveFT, providers of the Elastic Server Platform, an on-demand service for dynamic assembly and deployment of virtual machines, into a technology partnership to enable deployment of CohesiveFT’s Elastic Servers to FlexiScale’s Cloud. 

The integration of technologies from CohesiveFT and FlexiScale will enable true on-demand application stack assembly and deployment on our pay-as-you-go Cloud.  This combination allows genuinely scaleable, high availability production environments that do not require in-house operations expertise to build and maintain such a facility.  Beyond substantial manpower savings the combined solution significantly reduces capital and energy expenditures.

This partnership will also allow ISVs, application developers and QA teams to dramatically increase their productivity throughout the development lifecycle.  These teams will not be dependent on resource constrained operations departments to provision development and testing environments and will be able to change their application stack definitions with the click of a mouse.  Further, these development environments need only be retained while they are actively in use, and can be recreated with speed and quality whenever they are required.

Initially Elastic Server-branded virtual machines will be available from FlexiScale’s Control Panel as templates built in a Xen virtual format for deployment into Virtual Dedicated Servers (VDS) in FlexiScale’s Cloud.  The Elastic Server templates will feature application stacks as pre-built virtual machine images of popular components.  Users will have access to these custom images on demand, eliminating the typical administrative overhead of assembling virtual machine images “by hand”.

The combination of  FlexiScale and CohesiveFT provides customers with a self-service, rapid-response environment for deploying any kind of application.  Anchored by our on-demand computing Cloud and CohesiveFT’s dynamic virtual server assembly capabilities, this new approach takes all the upfront financial capital, human capital and lead time opportunity costs out.

“Cloud computing is revolutionizing the application development lifecycle,” says Pat Kerpan, our new technology partner, president and chief technology officer of CohesiveFT.  “Our partnership with FlexiScale will provide companies the ability to build and deploy a custom virtual server to a cloud in minutes which brings massive efficiencies to the adopters of this approach.”

This collaboration will enable full dynamic connectivity between the Elastic Server platform and FlexiScale’s Cloud in the very near future. It will provide you as the user with the added benefit of building exactly what you need in your application stacks and the ability to provision and start-up the server in minutes using your FlexiScale credentials from within the Elastic Server platform.

This is so cool. I can’t wait to see it in action.

Phil Huber

So a new blog post, eh? I just don’t know where to begin… a few bits of news, I guess, in no particular order:

FlexiScale is growing faster and faster as times go by, as per usual - with bandwidth consumption and storage being one of the main growth factors.  Of course there is also a plethora of new signups and business hopefuls, finally getting a realistic chance at trying out their business ideas without being tied in to expensive contracts… Who will be the next big thing? Let time tell…

Now, what does this mean?  That those startups that have been enabled by the platform only a few months ago are now growing exponentially too!

So big hand to our startups for doing quite this well! (and thanks, too - we’ve got a music store who are pushing vast quantities of storage for their online music platform and a major worldwide RSS syndicator are syndicating like bats outta hell! We’ve got hosting resellers actually creating a new control panel for their customers to tie in with the FlexiScale API, essentially white-labelling the platform for their customers, with their own value-added services on top… Are we seeing a new breed of hosting models here I wonder?

…all in all, we’ve got some really exciting projects, all enabled by the platform.

What else you ask? Well, we’ve been in discussions with Debian, CentOS and Ubuntu trying to develop better support for the platform and generally giving back to the community.  As you may already know, CentOS are already using some free FlexiScale servers for Dev purposes.  What you don’t yet know, is that some of the Ubuntu folks - both the Volunteers and Canonical - are starting to look interested.  If all goes to plan, what we will have is even better support for one of the fastest growing Linux distros out there.  Good for us, for obvious reasons, and good for them - better exposure, better uptake, more validation  

… what is that?  You want more? Well, we’ve got server cloning, load balancing coming into beta over the coming weeks.  We’ve got Firewalling with Firewall Templates coming out of beta in a few weeks.  We’re getting bigger shelves and more of them, bigger servers and more of them.  We’ve been pushing our customers to experiment and pushing our suppliers to support new ways of looking at hosted services and utility computing.  I personally have even been involved in hybrid solutions comprising of both Utility and traditional computing models in an effort to maximise our customers benefits of what is possible out there… More and more I find that imagination, combined with top-class technical staff and a robust infrastructure equal good times indeed!

Jonathan

We’re all excited at XCalibre as FlexiScale has been named as a finalist in the prestigious 2008 TechWorld Awards. The category we’re competing in is ‘Virtualisation Product of the Year’ and FlexiScale is up against some big names including VMWare and NEC, but that just convinces us of what a terrific product we’ve created. The winners will be announced on 11 June 2008, so we’ve got the champagne on order just in case.

Tony

Well there’s been a lot happening in Camp FlexiScale since Tony’s last post.

The developers have worked hard to bring more choice in OS image and we now have the following:

Windows Server (32 and 64-bit)

CentOS 5 (32 and 64-bit)

Debian (32 and 64-bit)

Ubuntu 6.06LTS (8.04LTS to follow soon)

Most of these images have been available because you guys have asked for them. We’ve always been and always plan to be customer led when it comes to development. We feel it’s important that you guys have your say which is one of the reasons that Jonathan has created the “wish list” thread on the FlexiScale forum. Of course, we won’t be able to cater for every request but where there’s clear demand we’ll certainly do our best to give you guys what you want so by all means go on and have your say.

FlexiScale is now growing at the phenomenal rate of 1% a DAY!

So how come that we’re getting this growth yet my phone’s gone quiet?

Online signups!

Since the online signups went live around 90% of people are signing up themselves online. This is great as it really shows how easy and intuitive the whole process is from signing up to provisioning and utilising your servers. Exciting times!

Please remember though that there are still some real live human beings at XCalibre that are happy to talk to you and help you with anything you need or any questions that you’d like answered. Besides, you’ve usually got some really interesting projects on that we miss hearing about.

We still want to make sure that our new online signups are getting on ok so what we’ll be doing is calling you. You don’t need to panic and hide from your phone, all we’ll be after is a friendly chat to make sure that you’re getting on alright and have everything that you need. So we hope you won’t mind.

We’ll be updating the blog on a more regular basis to keep everyone posted on where we are and what we’re up to so watch this space.

John

This post was meant to be just about all the places we will be appearing/visiting in the next few months and then I though it would be worth mentioning the geographic spread of our customer base already. (We were primarily just targetting Europe to begin with), so far we have customers in: The UK (obviously), Spain, Germany, Norway, Sweden, India, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Hungary, Iceland, Brazil, Australia, Canada, Slovenia, Denmark etc (I got halfway down the list of customers at this point). You’ll notice the USA is missing, that’s because I thought just putting ‘USA’ understated it a bit, so, some (but probably not all), of the states we have customers in: California, Minnesota, Missouri, Texas, Washington, Massachusetts, South Carolina, Conneticut, Iowa.

Now much as I would love a travel budget to visit each of the places I mentioned, I can’t see that ever happening, but we will be doing a number of trips this year to places where we do have large customer bases.

• London: We’ll be in London every few weeks, meeting clients, talks, etc
• Cologne: Philipp Huber our COO will be at WebHostingDay March 12-13th March.
• San Francisco: Tony Lucas CEO (Me!) will be at the Web 2 Expo, and in an around SF from the 18th to 29th of April
• Newcastle (UK): March 11th, (Me again!) at the AWS User Group talking about cloud/utility computing.

That’s the confirmed trips at the moment, no doubt we will be adding more later as time goes on.

Tony

Ok, well maybe that’s a bit overstating the power that FlexiScale has, but you get the idea, (and I’m a sucker for Animated Films)

We’ve been working flat out here over the past few months continuing adding new features to FlexiScale, and they will start to be rolled out in the next few weeks. We’re still keeping quiet about what some of them will be, until we roll them out, but let’s just say, we are all *really* excited about them.

Watch this space for more news in the next month as we roll them out.

Apart from that great news, a quick update on how FlexiScale is going, well, brilliant actually, usage has increased 100% in the last ~45 days, and we’re expecting it to keep speeding up from there. We’ve seen the first results of customers using the FlexiScale API thanks to our friends at Cognifide. More and more people are switching to it every week, infact in February we setup more new FlexiScale customers, than we did setup dedicated servers (for our existing business), and that’s pretty amazing!

We are going to start featuring some success stories on the blog soon, so if theres any customers reading this who would like a mention, just drop us an e-mail.

Until next time!

Tony.

Well here we are, the last couple of months have flown past so apologies for the lack of update, and all of a sudden it’s 2008!

Progress on FlexiScale is continuing very nicely, with more and more people using it every day. We intend to bring out the managed version of FlexiScale at some point in February, and we expect that to be a fairly big success.

We have a lot of plans for further development of FlexiScale over the coming year, and are going to be steadily recruiting staff to help get us there, (we’re currently planning to add up to another 10 people), so if you are interested in working for us, reinventing the entire computing market one step at a time then get in touch!

Tony.