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:
