Working at Voxel and living in Brooklyn, I could barely stand to be on the subway without toying on an iPhone or gazing at an iPad. But as there was no Voxel representation in the App Store, I was forced to toy with light sabers or scroll through my latest photos. Hating the thought that our customers suffered through this same ordeal, we’ve spent the last month tweaking our first generation iPhone and iPad application. I’m proud to announce that its available in the Apple App Store as of this week.
We’ve started by including basic support for viewing your VoxCLOUD physical and virtual servers, issuing reboots and checking vital device information such as IP addresses, console details, etc. Soon we’ll be adding your monitoring status as well as support for additional device types (VoxCAST, etc).
Keeping with the design and philosophy of our hugely popular Adobe AIR Desktop Application (available here), the iPhone / iPad application has a streamlined design that focuses on quick and easy access to the features you need most when managing your Voxel on-demand infrastructure.
If you’re a Voxel customer, go ahead and download the app via the app store and give it a whirl! Let us know your feedback along the way. And if you’re not setup for VoxCLOUD, simply signup here and you’ll be up and running on the Voxel global cloud in under 5 minutes.
As I’m now also a proud owner of an EVO 4G, keep your eyes peeled for additional mobile applications from Voxel!
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.
Rapid development of our VoxCLOUD product and associated Hosting API is a source of pride over here at Voxel — and today we’re happy to announce the release of our improved “clone” functionality for VoxCLOUD VM’s in all 3 of our global hosting locations: New York, Amsterdam and Singapore.
Before today’s release, users had the ability to instantly clone a live, running VoxCLOUD device using hAPI or our Desktop Infrastructure Manager. This feature was hugely useful in quickly scaling out an application or creating an instant development environment of an existing, running system. The clone feature would create an exact replica, including the point-in-time data of a production machine.
We’ve now extended that functionality to support creating a clone with differing resource specifications. Although this sounds like a small feature addition, the functionality it enables is huge. Applications or system admins can now react quickly to resize an existing VoxCLOUD server to compensate for increased load, even if they don’t have the ability to utilize horizontal scaling in their application. Simply live-clone your server to larger resources (say, from 2 cores to 6 cores) and shut down your old server. Update your IPs or DNS and you’re in business with a larger, faster machine in a matter of minutes.
To read more about our clone functionality, click here to read the full documentation or reach out to one of our Voxel engineers by emailing support@voxel.net with any questions.
Our development and engineering teams have been working since January on some updates to our various infrastructure services, including VoxCAST and our hosting API (hAPI). We are excited to announce that the following features have been deployed to our production systems:
DNS management as part of hAPI – Managing records (including creating, updating and deleting) is now fully support as part of Voxel’s hosted DNS services
We’ve released updated versions of our hAPI clients – These include various bug fixes, code optimizations and validation improvements. Grab them here.
Power management for VoxCLOUD – hAPI now includes data on power utilization for VoxCLOUD devices
In the coming week, you’ll also be seeing some improvements in our logging performance and stability, CDN routing and customer portal. Stay tuned!
The full change log for this release is as follows:
An issue was fixed in VoxCAST OnDemand Customer Portal config section that was causing error messages to not always properly display, leading to failed actions without any indication why.
VoxCAST OnDemand Customer Portal was changed to do more input validation on the origin name fields.
In hAPI, the Content-Type for JSON responses was changed to ‘application/json’ to better avoid XSS attacks in clients.
An issue was fixed in the hAPI perl client library to properly accommodate passwords with ‘@’ or ‘:’ characters.
An issue was fixed in the hAPI method, voxcloud.create, that was failing to properly use the passed-in parameter ‘console_password’.
A new method was added to hAPI, dns.records.create, for creating voxel-managed DNS records for authorized hostnames.
A new method was added to hAPI, dns.records.update, for updating voxel-managed DNS records for authorized hostnames.
A new method was added to hAPI, dns.records.delete, for deleting voxel-managed DNS records for authorized hostnames.
In hAPI, the unused parameter ‘processing_cores’ was removed from the documentation for the method voxcloud.clone.
The hAPI client libraries were updated to use the newer ‘json_v2′ format when returning JSON responses rather than the deprecated ‘json’ hAPI format.
hAPI input validation was changed to display different error messages for when a ‘method’ parameter was missing or invalid.
In hAPI, the methods voxservers.create and voxcloud.create were changed to always auto-assign a backend_ip if one is not provided.
Output for the hAPI method devices.list was extended to report estimated power usage in watts for VoxCLOUD devices.
A misspelling typo was fixed in the documentation for the hAPI method devices.monitors.create.
This video demonstrates how easy it is to set up both a physical and virtual server with just a couple clicks. Plus, see a basic overview of how to use Voxel’s content delivery network interface, VoxCAST.
Some high level goals we set for this app:
Ease of Use
Display an overview your Voxel global infrastructure at a glance
Give real-time feedback of your infrastructure’s status
Run fast while engaging user with a slick interactive UI
For this first iteration we focused our development around infrastructure. Eventually, we’re going to add full control of client management, including billing, support and more. We’re letting clients test drive our new portal while it’s in development.
It’s been a while since we last talked about Voxel Labs’s mod_cdn Apache module for easily interfacing an existing site with VoxCAST, so it’s definitely time for an update.
We’ve just released mod_cdn 1.1.0, which includes the following new features: * Support for timestamp-based VoxCAST OnDemand token authentication * Support for SSL-based sites * Support for using the X-Forwarded-For header when computing authentication tokens
For current users of mod_cdn, you’ll definitely want to update your server to use this new version in order to take advantage of the new features. Note that existing installations of mod_cdn will require a slight change to the CDNHTMLToServer option in the module’s configuration, so check the included example.conf for more details.
We’re still looking into adding new features such as “intelligent switching” to allow users to have their site automagically use VoxCAST to prevent their server from ever being overwhelmed with requests. With such a feature, a site could easily protect itself from things such as the Slashdot and Digg Effects all without your having to do a thing!
If you’re currently using VoxCAST for your CDN needs and haven’t yet tried mod_cdn, it may be well worth your time to take a look. We’re always available day or night at support@voxel.net to help you with any issues you may encounter, and, of course, we love receiving feature requests for ideas you may have for future releases.
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:
Working at Voxel and living in Brooklyn, I could barely stand to be on the subway without toying on an iPhone or gazing at an iPad. But as there was no Voxel representation in the App Store, I was forced to toy with light sabers or scroll through my latest photos. Hating the thought that our customers suffered through this same ordeal, we’ve spent the last month tweaking our first generation iPhone and iPad application. I’m proud to announce that its available in the Apple App Store as of this week.
