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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Part of the promise of cloud computing is the ability to pay for your IT resources only when you need them. Indeed, a key benefit of the cloud involves the idea of quickly provisioning servers ‘just in time’ when you need them, and destroying them just as quickly when you don’t.

Unfortunately, getting to the point of being able to spin servers up and down willy-nilly is pretty hard for most users. There are a few legitimate reasons for this.

1. Firstly, it can be a challenge to automate the deployment of your entire environment all the way from nothing to ‘ready to use’.  It’s certainly possible on most clouds (including VoxCLOUD), but often involves the use of custom images and deployment scripts.
2. Secondly, even if you do automate your deployment, it can take a long time for everything to get installed, downloaded, and deployed.

So in many situations, our customers have decided it’s just too much trouble to discard their servers, and they end up keeping them around more than they’d actually like to. In some ways, its kind of a dirty secret of the industry: cloud providers like it, because it means that the hourly charges keep on rolling.

Here at Voxel, we’ve released a key piece of functionality that we hope our customers will really appreciate: the ability to suspend a cloud server simply by powering it off, and having the data persist. Put your cloud servers to sleep, without killing them.

If you’re temporarily not using your cloud server with Voxel, you can simply power it off (via our API, our portal, or our Air app) and the hourly compute charges stop. Need to use it again? Just power it back on. Do this as much as you want (it doesn’t get much easier than this!) and while your servers are off, you pay only for storage.

Let’s say you’ve got a DR (disaster recovery) cluster on VoxCLOUD. Of course, it would be ideal to only pay for it when you need to fail over to it, but you don’t want to wait a long time for it to come online and get configured. When you need it, you need it now. On most clouds, this means you’ll need to keep your cluster running all the time. At Voxel, you can keep your cluster powered off (remember, the data persists), and simply power it on when you need it. It’ll start booting immediately and be available for use within a matter of minutes.

The cost savings are huge. We’ll use an example of a 10 core cluster with 5 servers with 20GB of disk each. If you kept them on the whole time, your hourly fee would be about $1.03 per hour. With the cluster powered off (ready to be booted up at any time), your hourly fee drops to about $0.03, since you’re only paying for storage and not compute.

VoxCLOUD already offers the best price-performance in the industry. With our new suspend feature, the economics just got better. And more importantly, we’ve put one of the key promises of cloud computing within reach of pretty much everyone.

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As I’ve been working out of our Singapore offices for the past 3 months, one of the most common questions I’ve received from local businesses is how cloud servers are different from shared hosting and VPS offerings.

While it’s true that cloud-based hosting is gaining significant ground in the U.S., adoption is relatively slow in most of Asia. According to William Fellows, from The 451 Group, 93% of spending on infrastructure as a service is done by the U.S., 6% by Europe and just 1% by Asia.

As such, we’ve decided to organize #cloudchat, an event at Hackerspace, to shed some light on the subject. Our VP of development, Michael Venzke, will be discussing basic cloud fundamentals and benefits over VPS; then delving deeper into more technical discussion points, such as cloud interoperability and automatic development/QA environments.

To complement, Dr. Kris Beevers, Voxel’s Principle Software Architect, will be discussing proper CDN implementation and performance optimization in cloud deployments.

If you happen to be in Singapore, please drop by. Our experts will be taking your questions. Students, entrepreneurs, local business, developers and start-ups are all welcome. Of course, food and drinks are on us!

Event Details:
Thursday, May 6th, 2010 @ 7:30pm
Hackerspace - 70A Bussorah Street, Singapore 199483
RSVP: twtvite.com/voxel-cloudchat
Follow us @voxeldotnet

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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.

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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.

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Security researchers recently uncovered an attack on web APIs that:

1. Compute a “string to sign” containing a shared secret followed by a concatenation of parameter names/values.
2. Compute a “signature” based on the string to sign using the MD5 hashing algorithm.

This authentication scheme is quite popular, in part due to its use by Flickr’s API, one of the first and most popular web APIs.  We use a related authentication scheme for our Hosting API, hAPI.

The security researchers contacted us with the details of their attack at 11:30 EDT on Friday, September 25.  The attack exploits technical properties of the MD5 hashing algorithm to append additional parameters to certain API calls, given the length of the API secret and the signature from a previous call. Their paper, which focuses mainly on Flickr’s API but makes brief mention of Voxel, and provides complete technical details of the potential vulnerability, is available online.

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Since scaling and hybrid infrastructure are hot topics around here, I thought I’d give you a snapshot of what’s possible when combining VoxCLOUD, hAPI, and post-install scripts; namely, grabbing the latest release of your application from an SVN repository and automatically adding  your new server into a load-balanced pool to serve web traffic — in under 4 minutes.

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Not to toot our own horn, but we’re pretty happy that the research firm, Gartner, has recently named Voxel in its list of “Cool Vendors in Cloud Computing System and Application Infrastructure, 2009.” This is all related to the hAPI-ness we’re creating with our infrastructure API’s and the recent announcement of the Silverlining Technology Preview.

If you’re a hosting customer of ours (or not!) we’d love to hear from you about how you’re mixing and matching traditional and cloud computing infrastructure in your deployments and what you’d love to have from a provider. We’re actively seeking feedback and word on successful implementations and if you’ve got a hAPI call you’d like to see in order to get programmatic access to your infrastructure, please let us know.

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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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Voxel has a lot of customers who really know what they’re doing. Many of them are in the business of writing code, and pointing and clicking and typing — manual stuff — is the kind of thing these customers tend to like to avoid. Be it purging content from VoxCAST, provisioning a new VPS or dedicated server, rebooting a machine, fetching performance data — whatever — there’s a case for letting our customers do it in code.

Voxel Labs to the rescue once again — this time with hAPI, Voxel’s new Hosting API. hAPI turns much of Voxel’s infrastructure inside-out and makes it programmatically accessible to our customers. hAPI is a REST API based on HTTP requests and XML or JSON responses, a lot like other popular web services APIs. To read more about the hAPI interface and get started, check out the hAPI documentation.

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