Beta Update: Reassign Elastic IPs, Simplified Copy & Paste of IP Addresses, Improved Monitoring

2010/08/26

We rolled out some smaller features and bug fixes recently, here's the quick summary.

To both the cloud view and an instance's detail page we added an easy way to copy the internal and external IP and host names to your clipboard. It's not hard to overlook, but here's a couple of screenshots to get you going. The cloud detail page includes buttons to copy the private and public IP address:

And the same on the instance detail page:

Pretty neat, if you need to copy around IP addresses to set up DNS names, or for use in your Chef cookbooks. The latter is not exactly recommended, we encourage on the data that's delivered to an instance during a Chef run, but from time to time you just gotta do what you gotta do.

In other feature news, it's now possible to re-assign an Elastic IP from one instance to another. Say you want to do a seamless failover from a smaller load balancer instance to a bigger one, or move your full setup from one cloud to another without having to change DNS names, that's now possible. You can reassign an Elastic IP to any instance managed by Scalarium, not matter if it's running or not.

Of course that will mean that the instance it belonged to will be assigned a new IP address by EC2. That may take a while, even up to a couple of minutes, we've seen it take two to three minutes on average. Assigning the Elastic IP to a new and running instance however, doesn't take more than a couple of seconds. It just takes Amazon a while to assign a new and random IP to the instance it belonged to. So the switch is almost immediate for the new instance, but it may take a while for the old instance to get a new IP.

Don't forget though that Elastic IPs assigned to instances that aren't running will cost $0.01 per hour. Elastic IPs are only free when they're used by an instance.

While we're at it, Elastic IPs so far weren't automatically assigned to instances that existed before you enabled "Auto-Assign Elastic IPs" for a role. That oddity is now also fixed. So when you start an instance for a role that has this option enabled, we'll get an Elastic IP for it, no worries.

We also extended the Ganglia statistics to include much more detail e.g. on Passenger (for Rails applications) and Apache requests, including statistics on what kinds of status codes are returned, how much memory Passenger processes use, and how many of them are running. Monitoring? We've got you covered!

Until now, we had some problems (that we didn't know of) handling instances in the US-East region. Our thanks to Till for helping us finding them and figure out what's wrong. Turns out the US-East region is quite a finnicky beast, having some oddities and very long delays in their APIs compared to all the other regions. For instances in that region, we can't show you the private IP within Scalarium, because the private DNS name doesn't follow a scheme that includes the IP in the name, only the internal MAC address, which isn't very helpful. You can still find out the internal IP in your Chef cookbooks using node[:ipaddress], and it's safe to just use the host name in most cases.

On a smaller side note, did we mention we're not private beta anymore? No need to register for an invitation, go straight to signing up, like, now!