We have added today 2 new Shared roles in the US East region, 32- and 64bit version of Ubuntu 10.04 pre-configured to run and scale MySQL version 5.1.41. They are both EBS-based, and use the new Scalarizr as the Scalr agent.
Other regions to come soon!
Not an Ubuntu fan? We just released 4 new pre-made roles in the US East region of EC2, with CentOS as the operating system. For those who don’t know what CentOS is, it’s a linux distribution that mirrors Red Hat, but without the trademarked material like logos.
This means that you can now scale your website (or individual components of your web stack) easily on an RPM package-based system. Two roles are available, ‘Base’ (which is ready to be customized into roles like Application servers, or ffmpeg transcoding servers) and ‘MySQL’ (which is ready to scale, using version 5.0.77). Both are EBS-based, which means that they can be start / stopped like any virtual machine, and run CentOS 5.4 (32 and 64bit).
US West, Europe, and Asia-Pacific regions to follow soon, as well as more flavors of linux.
These Roles use the all-new Scalarizr, our lightweight python agent that reports usage metrics back to Scalr to trigger the scaling. More on the Scalarizr in a later post.
Cheers,
The Scalr Team
Update: The new server’s IP address is 74.54.243.170, please add this to your security groups, with UDP ports 161-162 and TCP ports 22 and 3306.
Next Thursday (August 26) at 1:00 AM PST, we will add a new, non-cloud server to our infrastructure to improve fault-tolerance and performance. No UI downtime is expected, but there is a small chance that you might not be able to login a few times.
This is the last upgrade required to achieve full geographic fault-tolerance. Our nameservers are spread across 4 network-independent datacenters and two continents, and our http servers, polling servers, and database servers will all be fully redundant after the server addition.
Cheers,
The Scalr Team
Good day to all the Scalr users out there!
We added the set of pre-made Scalr roles to the Asia-Pacific region, so you can now scale in the most populated region of the world. This includes among others the NGINX load balancer, the Apache and Tomcat application servers, and MySQL database server.
You can set each of those to scale based on any of the Scalr metrics, such as Load Average (CPU), Free RAM available to the system, Network I/O, a fixed schedule, http request/response time, among others.
Description
The ssh extension that we use to upload changes to our nameserver configuration file (named.conf) segfaulted, causing corruption in it. This corrupted configuration was replicated to other name servers to propagate changes.
Timeline and resolution
Wed Aug 4 10:47 PST 2010 – The ssh extension used for transporting nameserver updates segfaulted.
The named.conf configuration file that was being transported was corrupted in the process, and was then synchronized to other nameservers.
Wed Aug 4 10:55 PST 2010 – A client reported an issue with DNS.
We found the corruption and started working on a fix.
Wed Aug 4 11:05 PST 2010 – We manually generated a new named.conf file, and uploaded it to the nameservers.
The new valid named.conf propagated to the other nameservers.
Prevention
To prevent this from happening in the future, we are taking the following action:
We will cease to use ssh as transport and will create a local daemon which will update named.conf directly from our database on each NS server. This daemon will be ready within the next 24 hours.
Estimated Impact
18 minutes.
Regards,
The Scalr Team
Congratulations to our friends at Rackspace and NASA Nebula, who launched OpenStack.org today!
Open Stack is an “open source, open standards” stack for Cloud Computing, which includes Compute (like EC2) and Storage (like S3). You can find all the code for Open Stack on Launchpad, as well as the other sub-projects like the iPad and iPhone apps.
This is a huge leap forward, probably the single most important announcement in the industry since EC2.
How does Scalr play into this?
We’re thinking about it. Scalr is currently licensed under the GPL v2, and we’d have to change that to the Apache License which the Open Stack charter requires. The Apache License precludes the dual licensing business model, in which we sell a commercial license to use Scalr for those averse to the GPL.
Open Stack also has a nascent Web UI, with a subset of Scalr’s functionality.
If anyone wants to weigh in here, their thoughts are welcome.
Today Scalr released the Scheduler, a Cron Job task manager designed for Cloud environments.
The problem is that Cron jobs, which are scripts that are executed periodically, were up until now tied to individual servers. When that individual server failed, the Cron job wouldn’t be executed. When that server was scaled, it would be executed once per server. This means that the tasks you set to be executed once per hour, could be executed 5 times in the hour, or not at all – not very reliable, to say the least.
Scalr based the Scheduler off Apache ZooKeeper, which is a part of Hadoop. It is a centralized service for providing group services, especially distributed lock services. The Scheduler extends Scalr’s scripting interface, and allows you to write scripts and set their execution schedule and scope: once on all servers, every hour on a subset of servers, daily on a single server, and any other combination!
As always, the code is available on Google Code and delivered as a service at scalr.net.
***
You can find the Scheduler under the Tools menu, found at the top when logged in:
You can schedule tasks to be executed periodically using the Scalr Scheduler
To add a Cron job or schedule a script, click the + icon next to the Search box:
Click the + icon to add a new cron job or to set a schedule for a script
You can then select the script to be executed, choose the parameters for it, schedule a time or interval, and run!
Configure the cron job's interval, parameters, and more
Hi all,
We pushed a new release out this week, a few of you might have seen this already.
This is a rather important update, as it brings us closer to Scalr 2.0, which will extend Scalr to all Operating Systems and environments. You can find the complete list of features added below, and I’d like to highlight the Scheduler, the improved Monitoring system, as well as the shortcuts to your farms added to the top menu.
Updated scalr.net, development.scalr.net and trunk repo for scalr o/s (http://code.google.com/p/scalr/source/browse/#svn/trunk).
Hi everyone, happy new year!
As part of our 2010 resolutions, we decided to keep in sync the source code on Scalr.net and that on Google Code. This is good news for everyone that deployed Scalr on their own servers, but also to everyone else as the power of open source lies in that other people can contribute to it. If somebody wants support for Eucalyptus, they can modify the source code to add capability for it, and send us a patch. We then merge it to the trunk, and you and everybody else then gets it. Patches should be sent to patches@scalr.com.
If you have suggestions for other resolutions, let us know!
Below is a complete changelog:
Events system improvements:
- Added new events: OnDNSZoneUpdated, OnEBSVolumeAttached
Scripting engine improvements:
- Added the zone_name variable for scripts executed on DNSZoneUpdate event
- Added the new_ip_address variable for scripts executed on IPAddressChanged event
- Added the volume_id and mountpoint variables for scripts executed on EBSVolumeMounted event
- The ability to execute scripts from the Scripts view page.
Snapshots manager improvements:
- Remove multiple snapshots in one time
- Share snapshots!
API improvements:
- Added methods: LaunchInstance, TerminateInstance, GetFarmDetails, GetScriptDetails, RebootInstance, GetEvents, GetLogs
- Added methods for working with DNS zones: ListDNSZones, ListDNSZoneRecords, AddDNSZoneRecord and RemoveDNSZoneRecord
- Improved the ExecuteScript method.
- Added LA for each instance to the GetFarmDetails method
- Added the ability to execute scripts with specified revision and parameters
Core improvements:
- Amazon RDS support
- Amazon Spot instances support.
- Amazon CloudWatch support (fine grained monitoring)
- Amazon VPC support (enterprise feature, deploy on non-shared servers)
- Rewrote the “Synchronize to all” feature. Cleaner and more reliable now.
- Same goes for AutoEBS and AutoEIP. Cleaner and more reliable.
- When you create a new AMI for a custom role, you can now switch over to it immediately.
- And the long awaited “Keep me logged in” checkbox on the login page!
- Filters for instances on the Servers view page.
- CloudFront distributions for domains not managed by Scalr.
- The ability to remove Elastic Load Balancers.
- Support for new region: us-west-1 (deploy on the west coast!)
- A new page with more details on the instance.
- Increased page load speed. Optimized js code. (faster, better interface!)
- An improved MySQL status page for your Farms
- The ability to set whether Scalr should terminate or reboot instances that fail to respond to SNMP calls.
- The ability to slowdown the scaling process
- Support for new instance types, the high memory instances (32 and 68GB of memory)
- The ability to add Google Apps MX records in the Zone Edit page in a single click.
- The ability to edit system DNS records. For advanced clients.
- The ability to set both size and snapshot for Role auto EBS (previously just one)
- Added ability to edit farm role specified security group
- Added Hide terminated instances checkbox on instances list.
- Added ability to view all instances (include non-scalr ones)
- Added ability to set system timezone for clients (Logs, Events, API logs)
- Fixed bug in garbage.php with “select all” checkbox
- Fixed bug with default SSH port (see thread)
- More than 200 bugs was fixed and tons of other internal improvements.
To update from 1.1 to 1.2: