Rupert Tagnipes

One of the recent trends in technology is the movement toward software-defined networks (SDN). With SDN, networking is no longer tied to a specific proprietary device but rather integrated via software. GoGrid has adopted this software defined networking architecture for its new product offerings starting with Dynamic Load Balancers and now with our new Firewall Service.

SDN typically means that the control plane is separated from the forwarding plane and is centralized. This setup is easier to manage and enables a more distributed system. In addition, management of the network is typically programmatic with SDN. In GoGrid’s architecture, for example, management is centralized while the activities are distributed.… Read the rest

The post Software Defined Networking on the Edge appeared first on GoGrid Blog.

Building out a highly available website means that it is fault-tolerant and reliable. A best practice is to put your web servers behind a load balancer not only to distribute load, but also to mitigate the risk of an end user accessing a failing web server. However, traditional load balancing funnels traffic into a single-tenant environment—a single point of failure. A better practice is to have a distributed load balancer that takes advantage of the features of the cloud and increases the fault-tolerance abilities on the load balancer. GoGrid’s Dynamic Load Balancer service is designed around a software-defined networking (SDN) architecture that turns the data center into one big load balancer.… Read the rest

The post High Availability with Dynamic Load Balancers appeared first on GoGrid Blog.

GoGrid has recently released some new features that improve on the customer experience using our private network.  Private Network Automation (PNA) is currently available in all our data centers. As of this most recent release, these new features will be exposed if you enable PNA by contacting support:

• All servers will have a private IP assigned upon creation (both virtual and dedicated)
• Any private IPs that are used will be marked as assigned on the portal
• Cloud Storage no longer requires static routes. It is now accessible via your favorite protocol (Samba, SCP, etc.)

The assignment of private IPs happen automatically at the time a new server is deployed.… Read the rest

The post Leverage Automation for your Private Network appeared first on GoGrid Blog.

Basho is a GoGrid partner and responsible for the open-source Riak project. If you are not familiar with Riak, it is a well regarded open-source distributed database. It was built off of the Dynamo concept so it is often compared to Cassandra and Amazon Dynamo DB.

Riak is used as a fast, fault-tolerant distributed database. Companies like Mozilla use it for storing and analyzing beta testing results. Mozilla needed a solution to help improve the user experience and that would allow them to store large amounts of data very quickly. Another example of a company using Riak is Bump which uses Riak to scale and manage massive amounts of data sent between it’s millions of users.… Read the rest

The post Create a Basho Riak Cluster on GoGrid appeared first on GoGrid Blog.

I recently attended Under the Radar 2012 as GoGrid was a sponsor of this event. As there were several tracks, Michael Sheehan and I split the tracks and I covered Infrastructure, Database Scalability and Big Data. Michael covered Mobile Access, Infrastructure, Performance Monitoring, PaaS in Part 1.  Overall, the presenting companies have some compelling ideas and it gives an indicator as to the new thinking happening in Silicon Valley. The trends that I noticed were: a continued interest in private clouds, the increase in adoption of Openstack and the prevalence integrating Big Data.

If you never attended Under the Radar, the format is to have four startups that already have a real product present for 6 minutes and are then judged by a panel of experienced executives at more established companies.… Read the rest

The post Under The Radar 2012 Recap & Analysis – Summing Up Some Secret Startup Sauce (Part 2) appeared first on GoGrid Blog.