scalarium.com Syndication

node.js version selection

2011-11-21T00:00:00Z

We deployed support for node.js apps some months ago. When you wanted to select a node.js version different from the default, you had to do so with, for example, custom JSON.

Until today.

You can now select the node.js version via the node.js settings, stored with your node.js app server role. Of course, you can still set the version by using custom JSON.

Improved instance selection when repeating deployments

2011-11-18T00:00:00Z

When you deploy an application with Scalarium, you can pick the instances to deploy to. Unless you explicitly deselect some instances, the deployment hits every running instance.

We changed that behavior slightly for repeated deployments.

Say you have a deployment in a cluster with two running instances. During that deployment you decided to skip one instance. When you repeat that deployment, the skipped instance is still skipped, all other running ones are selected for deployment.

For 24/7 instances that results in every instance that was selected before, but it also includes load and time based instances that were not running before but are running when you repeat the deployment.

Introducing the Scalarium client

2011-11-17T00:00:00Z

When working on an instance over SSH, there are lot of jobs that need to be done again, and again, and again. Scalarium being a product that focuses on automation, we thought it'd be a good idea to create a handy tool that helps us with these jobs. We call it the Scalarium client.

From now on, the client is part of the Scalarium agent, which runs on every instance. The client is symlinked in /usr/sbin, so you can use it from anywhere.

Here's what it looks like.

root@instance:/# scalarium-client
usage: scalarium-client command [command options]

Commands:
    help   - Shows list of commands or help for one command
    list   - List all chef JSON files and their activities (setup, configure, ...)
    log    - View the latest or a given chef log file
    run    - Do some real work, call help run for details
    status - Display useful information

The client makes things easy that were possible before, but tedious. It tells you what happened on your instance, as an overview or in detail. It tells you the status of the Scalarium agent.

The client also lets you do things that weren't possible before. Imagine you want to run a single one of your custom recipes. You also want it to look and feel like you triggered it from the Scalarium UI, but you don't want to actually go to the Scalarium UI.

The client does that for you. Your recipe is run, custom JSON you defined in the Scalarium UI is included, the chef run shows up in the instance's logs in the Scalarium UI.

Give it a try, and have a look at our knowledge base for details and examples.

New Chef Event Type: Shutdown

2011-11-02T00:00:00Z

Scalarium is all about automation and customization. The main system behind the automation for the instance configuration in Scalarium is the life cycle system.

When an instance boots and connects back to Scalarium, it triggers the setup event and thus executes the bootstrapping.

Once an instance successfully finishes its setup, the configure event is triggered on all instances in the same cloud. This way they can update their configuration if necessary. So a load balancer instance will add the newly booted application server and the database server will add an ACL entry that allows this application server to connect to the database.

When an instance is stopped, the configure event is triggered again. This way your applications and services always know about the current state of your cloud and can respond to changes if necessary.

Scalarium also offers the deploy and the undeploy event that are triggered when you deploy or delete an application.

Today we introduce a new event type: shutdown.

The shutdown event is triggered when you stop an instance. Previously Scalarium would immediately stop the instance on EC2 and trigger a configure on the whole cloud.

From now on Scalarium first sends the shutdown event to the instance and waits 45 seconds and only then really stops the instance. During those 45 seconds you can run any cleanup recipes that e.g. shutdown services or deregister your instance from other services.

The built-in recipes make use of this to stop Apache or MySQL on the instances. This way instances are removed from the load balancer in a cleaner way.

As with all other event types, you can of course add your own Chef recipes for your role that will be run on shutdown.

If want to know more about the shutdown event or custom instance setup in general, make sure to check out the documentation.

Awesome customers are awesome

2011-10-21T00:00:00Z

Today I want you to introduce you to two of our customers. Both had a good last week and we thought we should share that with the rest of you.

Infopark

Thomas Witt sent us this nice mail

Dear everyone,

we just won the Computerwoche #1 award from Computerwoche's Best In Cloud award (category: platform as a service). Without AWS and Scalarium this wouldn't have been possible! Thank you guys!

Best, T.

Infopark offers a CMS called Fiona which is widely used especially in the German speaking countries.

The best in cloud award was handed out by a big German tech newspaper called Computerwoche (“computer week”). They applied with a project called “Airport Nürnberg auf Wolke 7 - Webauftritt, CMS und WebCRM als Plattform aus der Cloud”.

Infopark hosts the SaaS version of the Fiona CMS on Scalarium and automatically creates a tenant version for new customers with our API

Check the infopark cloud express CRM at infopark.com

Crashlytics

Scalarium customer Crashlytics had a great last week too. Jeff Seibert and Wayne Chang raised $1 million in a seed funding round.

Crashlytics addresses the needs of app makers to better understand what sort of bugs their mobile applications are experiencing. The lightweight Crashlytics SDK (~ 75 kB) works alongside other SDKs without any problem.

They care deeply about building great tools for developers and build a product for iOS crash reporting - with Android crash reporting coming soon.

If you are developing mobile apps you have to check it out and sign up - crashlytics.com

Crashlytics processes the crash reports and exceptions and hosts its public Web site on Scalarium. In this way they can ramp up staging systems and scale with the number of incoming crash reports in no time.

You have an awesome story you want to share? Feel free to shoot me an email at thomas.metschke@scalarium.com

Regards, Thomas