Not that long ago, we redesigned the “admin” interface for managing environments, teams, users, and permissions. We didn’t stop there, and today we’re releasing a new interface for the role builder: our software that lets you create new roles for public and private clouds that don’t support sharing images.

Choose the cloud on which you want to create your role, then choose your operating system

It uses the same three-tier layout as the admin interface, wherein you start by selecting the cloud where you want to create the role. You then choose the region and operating system, followed by the software you want to install. Finally, you give the role a name, and click create.

Choose what software you want, and Scalr will bundle automation free of charge!

The more advanced Scalr reader will be pleased to know that roles can now be custom built using Chef, and you can find a variety of options in the Advanced section.

Customize roles with Chef

Happy role creation!

The Scalr “rock & role” Team

We added support for AMI region copy last week, and realized we forgot to add snapshot copy while we were at it. So here it is, in all its glory.

EBS snapshot copy

This makes it easy to copy database snapshots from one region to another, which is useful for migrating a farm another region, giving your read-slaves a head-start, or creating wide area database clusters.

Now go forth and copy!

Cheers,
The Scalr “copypasta” Team

Good news for those of you deploying infrastructure around the world: AWS has added the capability to copy AMIs from region to region. This functionality has been long awaited for, and facilitates the maintenance of global infrastructure, by reducing setup variety.

You see, even when you have your infrastructure neatly expressed in code, if you can’t get exact replicas across geographies, you’re bound to run into issues caused by inadvertent base image differences. These issues are hard to troubleshoot, and sometimes hard to fix.

But that’s not the only use case. Perhaps you don’t like Ruby, and don’t want to use Chef as a consequence. Perhaps you use images to revision your platform, like the excellent folks at Netflix do, then deploy application code directly. If so, this new functionality is a godsend, allowing you to bake images once, and use worldwide.

Well, this has been added to Scalr, and you can now use it from the UI, as seen below:

Copy to another region

Then simply select your source and destination regions

Source and destination regions

A few minutes later, you’ll have a multi-image role.

The role is now available to be deployed in us-east-1 and us-west-1

Easy as pie! Amazon hasn’t been clear so far on how long it takes for an image to transit from region to region, but evangelist Jeff Barr does say that it transfers encrypted, so you don’t need to worry about the privacy of you data as it transits the public Internet.

Enjoy!

- The Scalr “Copy Paste International” Team

Scalr now supports GCE

For the third day in a row, we’re excited to announce the extension of our multi-cloud support. We’re definitely on a roll here. This time, it’s so you can deploy and manage workloads on Google Compute Engine. But first– a quick note for those not lucky enough to have gotten an invite: let us know and we might be able to score you one!

Google products are known for their speed, and GCE is no exception. Ever since we got our hands on it after Google IO, we’ve been awed by its performance. The wizards at Google are capable of doing wonders (we have a technical blog post coming up to elaborate on the speed aspect), so it is with great pleasure that we make this generally available.

Starting today, you can use Scalr to design and manage resilient, scalable infrastructure on GCE, and our roles have had their multi-cloud capabilities extended accordingly.

GCE is quite different from EC2, both in terms of functionality and speed. Because of this, the failover, scaling, and backup algorithms we use for EC2 needed to be adapted and optimized, and this took time and experimentation to guarantee our users the state of the art in resiliency and scalability.

Have at it, and as usual, your feedback is vital to us. We listen to you 24/7 at feedback@scalr.com.

Cheers,
Scalr “Not just for search anymore” team

Today, we are rolling out support for the Rackspace Open Cloud. Let me pause here for a second to thank Rackspace for the generous contributions to the OpenStack project, and for working with us to guarantee an outstanding user experience on Rackspace.

Rackspace Open Cloud is now fully supported

AWS is currently the 800 lb gorilla in the marketplace, but after having seen what Rackspace’s Open Cloud offers, we believe it has become a very strong, legitimate contender in the industry. Here are a few use cases where it really shines:

• For small and medium businesses. Not every company can afford a dedicated IT staff, and not every company even wants to. Rackspace’s Open Cloud managed offering affords the lean SMB competent and timely IT resources for a nominal, very much worth it, fee.
• For principled developers and executives. Rackspace’s Cloud is open, and entirely based on OpenStack. This reduces lockin, and reduces long term risk: imagine if you had bet on Blackberry in 2007. Insure yourself against loss with an open cloud.
• For performance freaks. Rackspace offers the unique capability to run physical and cloud infrastructure side by side. Give each workload it’s rightful place, and squeeze every ounce of performance out of your infrastructure.

All legacy Rackspace cloud customers have had their keys automatically entered into the Rackspace Open Cloud, so they can get started immediately. It’s entirely superior, so there’s no reason not too.