The Official Scalr blog software to auto-scale the world's websites

New IP in address pool

We have a new IP in our address pool: 174.37.32.18

If you use a whitelist or security groups to restrict access to your instances, you'll need to add this address to it. We'll start using it in 2 weeks to deliver messages and collect statistics from your instances.

Here's a full list of IP addresses Scalr.net uses.

Deprecating Scalr’s ami-scripts agent

About a year ago, we made a significant architectural change to Scalr, and rewrote about 15k lines of code in the process. This rewrite was required to support multiple Clouds like EC2, Rackspace Cloud, but also to take infrastructure management to new levels of convenience and automation. Part of this rewrite involved creating a new guest agent to replace the kludge of bash scripts we hacked together when we started the project.

We've now hit a spot where we can't make the old agent, scalr-ami-scripts, support the cool new features (like Monitoring and Alerting!) coming out, or even some of the ones we released in 2.1, or 2.2. So to get them, you'll have to upgrade to the secure & faster scalarizr.

We wrote up some documentation to guide you through the process here: http://wiki.scalr.net/Tutorials/AMI_Scripts_to_Scalarizr_transition

This old agent will continue to be supported for the next 3 months, after which, if you haven't upgraded, we'll send pirate-ninja-cyborg-jesus after you:

100% badass

Scalr Raises, Like, A Hundred Dollars

Scalr Raises, Like, A Hundred Dollars

Investment to Continue Building a Simpler, Easier to Use Alternative to RightScale and perhaps get a new mat for the office door

SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- Today Scalr announced that it has completed a $95 dollar round of financing. Scalr will use the funds to have lunch at a local Indian restaurant in the Bay area.

The financing consists of several investment sources including Sebastian's Mom and UTMEF (the Under-The-Mattress-Emergency Fund).

In the last year, Scalr has been called "the best cloud app ever" by some random guy on the Internet, and "America's best auto-scaling tool" in an internal email from Sebastian to Igor Savchenko, Scalr's CTO. Sources that leaked the details of that private email wish to remain unnamed, but the company of 10 engineers is so small that it wouldn't take much to deduce who it was. In 2010 Scalr:

• Expanded from 2 to 3 countries by hiring an Intern from France
• Launched in almost 1 new market, but backed away to remain focused on scaling web apps
• Grew users by 1000% (but hasn't specified any data points so this is really quite meaningless)
• Saved users from days of downtime by not screwing up and actually doing the job they are supposed to do
• Added support Rackspace Cloud alongside EC2, as well as Eucalyptus and Nimbula, but utterly failed to do so for OpenStack and Cloud.com

“This is definitely not a bubble”, says Gump, senior analyst at Forrester. “Such a conservative amount shows an incredible amount of restraint from the Venture Capital industry.” This comes in stark contrast to Pastel, a startup that raised $41M from Oak Tree Capital before they had even launched.

Scalr Founder and CEO, Sebastian Stadil wasn’t surprised about the new round of financing; “Scalr is already pretty far ahead”, he insists. “We’ve had 3 years to make our software easier to use than our competitor RightScale. For a while we wanted to raise capital as a business model, but twitter beat us to it. We plan on using the capital to get Indian food next Friday.” When asked if the $95 would be enough to pay for lunch for the entire Scalr team, Sebastian declined to comment. He looked worried though.

About Scalr
Scalr is not just an ordinary Cloud management tool. Well, actually, it is, but our marketing department came up with some nice buzzwords to make it sound more interesting than it really is: Scalr is a real-time, open source, distributed, social, mobile, html5 app that helps you scale web applications.

Added support for Japan region

AWS announced last night that they had opened up a datacenter in Tokyo, Japan. We added support for it this morning, and if you go to the Role Builder (Roles -> Role builder), you'll be able to create Roles there.

We're working to release officially supported images, and will have them by tomorrow unless you hear otherwise.

I wonder what other datacenters Amazon is building. My guess is one in Amsterdam, or perhaps Paris.

New UI for DNS management

Those of you who have been with us for a while most likely knew this already, but the code responsible for the user interface to our DNS management tool was pretty old. In fact, it was some of the oldest in the system. We were never quite happy with it despite some improvements, so we decided to make a complete overhaul.

And lo and behold! 'Tis now done.

Brand spankin' new UI for your site's DNS records

If you click the above thumbnail, you'll see a screenshot of the new UI, which allows you to use your own domain name or a temporary one under scalr.ws, create your DNS records (or let Scalr create them for you), and more. This makes it trivial to create new subdomains, configure MX records for email, and more.

And it's much more visually appealing, don't you think?

Scalr joins the OpenStack family!

After two OpenStack summits, numerous presentations, and a plethora of email, Scalr is now part of OpenStack under the creative name "openstack-platform-php". A big thanks to Mike Mayo for making it happen.

While this is in itself pretty cool, it'll be a whole lot better when we support OpenStack, which we aim to do for the Bexar release in Spring.

Meanwhile, Rackspace support is just around the corner. Stay tuned...

New Roles available

Scale from ONE server to MANY!

We are pleased to announce that our most requested feature, the ability to scale from a single server to multiple ones, has just been added as a LAMP stack role.

Here's an image of how it works:

You can find it under the new Mixed Roles category, where we'll continue to add Pre-made images for whole stacks.

This image is particularly awesome because it allows you to run a single server, with all the functionality of a whole server farm with load balancer, apache, and mysql, at a fraction of the cost, typically one third. When load increases on this server, a second server is added, and serves http requests like the first one, but also acts as a mysql slave.

The only configuration required in your application to use this, is to direct reads to localhost but writes to your int-mysql-master subdomain (details).

Enjoy!

New Apache and nginx Roles

We released new CentOS Roles for apache and nginx today in all EC2 regions. They are EBS-based, and run on CentOS 5.5.

Enjoy!

CentOS now available in all Regions

Last month we added CentOS roles to the US-East region - today we've extended this to all the other ones.

These new Roles use the Scalarizr and are EBS-based, which allows you to pause/resume running instances similar to what you can do with virtual machines.

Enjoy!