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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