FlexiScale: New beta release

Posted on April 21, 2010 by Tony Lucas

We did promise that updates to FlexiScale would be more often when we launched version 2.0, and we weren’t kidding.

This week alone we have successfully rolled out three major new features. Much more detail on them will come in individual blog posts, but here’s a quick preview:

Reverting Snapshots

Up to now you have been able to use snapshots to easily clone servers, which is great, but we’ve gone one better.  With one click (or API call) you can now rollback a disk to any snapshot you have taken from it previously. All you need to do is shut the machine down, hit revert, and boot it straight back up, and it’s done.  Sure beats trying to restore backups when a box goes wrong.  You do need to make sure you are taking the snapshots first though!

Private VLANs

Much as we know offering individual customers their own VLANs at all is very cool, and not something all Cloud providers do by any means, we thought it would be great to add the ability for customers to have their own private VLANs.  One more step towards integrating your Cloud based servers with your existing IT.

All you need to do is create a new VLAN and tick the box marked ‘private’.  You will then have a VLAN setup with any IP configuration, and you can use whichever internal numbering range you would like.  These can be valid RFC1918 addresses or even a subnet from your own internal network, which you connect through a VPN running on one of your servers.

The only thing you have to remember is private does mean private.  The VLAN itself will not route traffic to the internet, so you will need to connect to it via a server you have running on a public VLAN (setting up a VPN/Tunnel etc), but that’s the idea! Of course you can use our console feature to manage it as well.

Disk/Image Uploading

Saving the best to last, we are so excited about the final update we have done.  You can now easily upload your own images/disks to the platform.  In fact, upload is a bit of an incorrect statement, as we will happily go and grab it for you.  All you need to do is click ‘Fetch Disk’ or ‘Fetch Image’ and put in the URL where your image is stored (http, https, ftp or ftps) and our system will go and grab it, register it in our system and it will be all ready for you to use a few minutes later; it took 7 minutes for me to grab a 3.5GB ISO, for example. That means you can provision a new server with a blank default disk, fetch your favorite operating system as a new disk, attach it to your server, boot it, and install as if you were sitting in front of the machine with a CD or DVD.

At the moment we support raw disk format and ISO format (so you can easily upload CDs and DVDs as well).  Let’s just say watch this space about automatic conversion of other formats, both from different hypervisors and from other cloud providers…..

That’s all for this time, but as usual, please let us know what you think, we really appreciate feedback!

Tony Lucas @tonylucas on Twitter