December 30th, 2009
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
Posted in Release | 3 Comments »
December 15th, 2009
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
Posted in Release | No Comments »
November 30th, 2009
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
Posted in Release | 3 Comments »
November 24th, 2009
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.
Posted in Release | No Comments »
November 19th, 2009
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:
- A new event: OnEBSVolumeAttached
- An improved MySQL status page for your Farms
- Initial Amazon RDS support
- 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 records. For advanced clients.
- API changes: Added LA for each instance to the GetFarmDetails method
- The ability to set both size and snapshot for Role auto EBS (previously just one)
- Internal improvements.
For Scalr Remote (mobile.scalr.net), you’ll find:
- Better layout when images are disabled
- Added version number in footer
- Added LA and Uptime on instance details page
- Added View instances from farm details page
Drop us a note if you have any feedback!
Posted in Release | 4 Comments »
October 22nd, 2009
We integrated phpmyadmin, a database administration tool, into Scalr today. It allows you to see the data you have on your database, update individual records, alter tables, and do lots of other stuff.
This is another step into making Scalr a great tool for sysadmin work, and making great sysadmin more accessible to non-specialists.
You can find it under Farms > View, and from options, select MySQL status. Click ‘Setup PHPMyAdmin access’, wait a minute, refresh, and you’re done!
Let us know what you think!
Posted in Announcements | 1 Comment »
October 14th, 2009
If you used Scalr.net these last few days, you probably experienced some mysql connection errors. These were due to a very large amount of concurrent connections, typically when a large farm (100+ instances) is launched, as it triggers too many requests too quickly, before Scalr can react to load.
This was more of an architectural flaw, so we worked to reduce the amount of requests every instance makes. In many cases we got it down to a single request. For example, when an instance requests a list of instances of a role, it now gets all the information for all roles in the single initial request. Same goes for the config_opts queries from instances, equally optimized (we brought down the amount of requests to rebuild /etc/aws/hosts from 5 requests to a single one).
The next thing we did is tune mysql to handle thousands of connections, and over 100 other settings and sysctl options, then optimized our db structure (incl. added new indexes).
We also moved some stuff higher up in the stack to nginx, to be served faster.
We took the occasion to rewrite the client dashboard so that logs load instantly. You’ll notice this when you first log in.
Bottom line is that things are faster for you, and put less load on us.
Posted in Announcements | 2 Comments »
September 28th, 2009
Hi all,
Amazon announced availability of a couple new features last week, one of which is the possibility of using Elastic Load Balancing for EC2 in the EU region.
This will interest those who have users in Europe and have created a farm in the EU region to reduce latency. They can now save on a dedicated instance serving as a load balancer, as Scalr has added support for it.
Cheers,
Sebastian
Posted in Announcements | No Comments »
September 23rd, 2009
Last week we announced Scalr Mission Critical, a service that guaranties that someone will be there to help if your site goes down. It gives you phone support, IM support, and short response times when using support.scalr.net.
This week we are proud to announce Scalr Development, a free version of Scalr open for developing your application while you don’t need the scalability requirements of a Production environment. This edition is limited to subdomains of development.scalr.net, so you can use myapp.development.scalr.net, for example. When you are ready to launch, just use ApacheBench or Tsung to test reaction to massive load, then sign up for Scalr Production and you’ll be good to go.
We are only accepting a limited amount of users this week, so please be patient if you are not accepted immediately.
Cheers,
Sebastian, on behalf of the Scalr Team.
Posted in Announcements | No Comments »
September 18th, 2009
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!
Posted in Release | 2 Comments »