Last week we deployed another cumulative release that brought a bunch of new methods to our Voxel Hosting API (hAPI). You can now manipulate payment methods, pay invoices, list all the services on your account including current usage charges, and perhaps most powerfully, you can now retrieve historical metrics from your devices for a variety of data points.

Using voxel.devices.metrics.list and  voxel.devices.metrics.read, you can view things like Apache connection counts and requests per second; Mysql connection and operation counts; disk, memory, and cpu  usage; system load; I/O rates; and bandwidth rates. Not only are you able to retrieve current usage, but also historical usage for as far back as we have records, even using different data point step sizes, like 1minute/hour/day/month, etc. This can be a powerful tool to create your own monitoring applications or to apply alerting logic, even to decide when to spawn new cloud instances based on load or traffic.

We’ve also extended hAPI to respond with compressed output when requested, and implemented compression by default in all our example client libraries. As always, this release included some minor bug fixes and additional small features. The complete changelog is below.

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We’re pleased to announce the release of new Voxel hAPI methods, now available for use via the version 1.0 endpoint. These new methods add more CDN API functionality with the introduction of VoxCAST OnDemand log manipulation, both for retrieving access logs and configuring the settings and format of the logs.

We’ve also introduced a new section, billing, with initial methods for viewing invoices and payments. hAPI methods are released as they’re completed, so look for more on the horizon and continue to send us your feedback and suggestions for new API methods!

Here are quick links to the documentation for the new methods:

• voxel.billing.invoices.list
• voxel.billing.payment_methods.list
• voxel.billing.payments.list
• voxel.voxcast.ondemand.logs.list
• voxel.voxcast.ondemand.logs.download
• voxel.voxcast.ondemand.logs.fields.list
• voxel.voxcast.ondemand.format.read
• voxel.voxcast.ondemand.format.update
• voxel.voxcast.ondemand.settings.list
• voxel.voxcast.ondemand.settings.update

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We’re a big fan of open source here at Voxel, and have recently been expanding our support by donating hosting through our global VoxCAST CDN. For over a year now we’ve been mirroring Sourceforge on VoxCAST, hitting near-daily peaks of 300Mb/s.

Lately we’ve been working with Reed Loden @ Mozilla to set up a Mozilla mirror with VoxCAST, and it was up and running just in time for the Firefox 3.5 release.

Over the past 24 hours, we’ve served about 7+ TB out of our mirror, handling 7+ million requests.

I’m not exactly sure how they chose to send traffic our way, but we served nearly as much out of Europe as we did in the US, and a nice chunk out of Asia. For those interested, here’s a breakdown of the day by consolidated network locations we served Mozilla data out of:

• New York – 970k requests, 1TB
• Chicago – 400k requests, 500GB
• DC – 1M requests, 1TB
• San Jose – 1M requests, 1.1TB
• Amsterdam – 3M requests, 3TB
• Singapore – 800k requests, 500GB

Just before 5pm EDT, our mirror peaked around 4.5 Gb/s. The aggregated graph below is a good example of what can happen to a popular website with sudden traffic spikes:

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A month ago we announced hAPI, a HTTP REST API with XML or JSON responses, and the exposure of some VoxCAST CDN functionality through this programmable interface. Since then, VoxCAST customers have eagerly adopted it, requested more and more features, and submitted their own PHP, Perl, and Python client code as examples for everyone else.

We’ve been really excited about the response hAPI has received, and how it simplifies tasks not only for our customers, but even within our own systems at Voxel. As we mentioned last month, the CDN API calls were just the beginning.

Now we’re ready to announce some hosting API methods for the rest of our customers.

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