The Official Scalr blog

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.

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:

Scalr now supports Spot Instances from AWS! You can find the official documentation here: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot-instances/

Spot instances is theoretically a great way to lower your web infrastructure costs: since the hourly cost of a Spot instance will likely not go above the rate of an On Demand instance, then if you set your Spot price above that, you will always keep your instances running. You’ll then be saving the difference between the current Spot price and that of a Reserved or  On Demand instance. Let us know if you try this and have any success with it.

To get started, from the menu: Tools -> Amazon Web Services -> Amazon EC2 -> Spot instances.

I hope everyone has a happy new year’s celebration!

Cheers,
Sebastian on behalf of all of Scalr

Lots of Cloud goodness for everyone! The December release brings:

* Amazon CloudWatch support (fine grained monitoring)
* Amazon VPC support (enterprise feature, deploy on non-shared servers)
* Filters for instances on the Servers view page.
* CloudFront distributions for domains not managed by Scalr.
* The ability to remove Elastic Load Balancers.
* The ability to execute scripts from the Scripts view page.
* Support for new region: us-west-1 (deploy on the west coast!)
* A new page with more details on the instance.
* Various bugfixes and improvements.
* Increased page load speed. Optimized js code. (faster, better interface!)

On behalf of everyone at Scalr, we wish you happy holidays!

Cheers,
Sebastian, on behalf of the Scalr Team

We are pleased to announce a new algorithm to base your application / website scaling on, scaling based on URL response time.

If response time is critical to you, you can now set this parameter and Scalr will add more nodes when response time on a URL increases above a threshold, or remove nodes when the response time decreases below another.

To access this algorithm, simply edit the Farm from the options menu, select the Role for which to change the scaling algorithm, click the scaling tab, and select ‘Enable scaling based on HTTP URL Response time’. Then add your parameters and url.

Cheers,
Sebastian

More Scalr goodness for Thanksgiving!

You can now terminate and reboot instances in mobile.scalr.net, and add comments/description for Farms in scalr.net.

There’s also an improved EBS snapshots manager; you can now

• Remove multiple snapshots in one time
• Share snapshots!

For those using the free development.scalr.net, it has been updated with the latest Production bugfixes, too.

Hi all!

We’re proud to bring you November’s release, as you’ll see filled with useful new features.

In scalr.net, you’ll find:

1. A new event: OnEBSVolumeAttached
2. An improved MySQL status page for your Farms
3. Initial Amazon RDS support
4. The ability to set whether Scalr should terminate or reboot instances that fail to respond to SNMP calls.
5. The ability to slowdown the scaling process
6. Support for new instance types, the high memory instances (32 and 68GB of memory)
7. The ability to add Google Apps MX records in the Zone Edit page in a single click.
8. The ability to edit system records. For advanced clients.
9. API changes: Added LA for each instance to the GetFarmDetails method
10. The ability to set both size and snapshot for Role auto EBS (previously just one)
11. Internal improvements.

For Scalr Remote (mobile.scalr.net), you’ll find:

1. Better layout when images are disabled
2. Added version number in footer
3. Added LA and Uptime on instance details page
4. Added View instances from farm details page

Drop us a note if you have any feedback!

We are pleased to announce Scalr Mission Critical today, a plan aimed at mission critical sites where downtime is not an option.

Scalr Mission Critical offers phone support, a service level agreement or SLA, and quick response times when any issues arise.

Learn all about it here.

To sign up, just login as normal and on the dashboard, change your account type to Mission Critical!