Network Redux

Drupal Redux

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 15:44:44 -0800

How fast is Drupal on a Network Redux Enterprise Virtual Server? Our clients know. Now we'd like the industry to know.

We are opening up ten (10) slots for ten new client/companies to submit a request for a Drupal Optimized platform on our Enterprise Virtual Server platform. This is a first come first serve basis and the first year is free. You may use this for personal or non-profit or corporate purposes, no strings attached.

*The Ingredients?

Datacenter: Internap Seattle (SEF003)
Carriers: (9) 10Gbps / MIRO
Routing Platform: Juniper MX
Switching Platform: Force10 C Series
Hypervisor: Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition
Guest OS: Ubuntu 10 LTS
Userland: Our own brew
Dedicated Processor: (1) 2.8Ghz Xeon Core
Dedicated Memory: 2048MB
Dedicated SAS-15K SAN Storage: 24GB

And fully managed by our team of software engineers and system architects.

Ready to try one out at no cost for the first year? Send us your request to drupal@networkredux.com and we'll take the first ten inquiries from those of you who are looking to enhance your drupal hosting experience.

Enjoy!

Instantly Reset your VM & Centos 6 Announcement

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 09:38:45 -0800

Last week we deployed a couple of updates to the Dashboard for Virtual Server customers. First off, you can now completely reset your VM back to it's original state. Note: This is not reversable.

You can access this feature by clicking on "Manage" next to your VM, and then clicking "Reset VM".

We also updated our Server Images, and you can now order Centos 6!

Juniper SRX and JunOS with VPN Tracker

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 14:48:13 -0800

I wish this article had been published prior to engaging our first series of SRX units. Over the last couple of months we’ve actively deployed close to (20) SRX 240 units, primarily in active/passive chassis clusters.

Quite a few of our customers rely on VPN connectivity to manage their private clouds. Quite a few of our clients are also Mac shops, similar to our organization.

A popular, yet expensive VPN client is made by our friends at Equinux called VPN Tracker. This is without question the most powerful and robust VPN client I’ve ever seen on any platform be it Mac, Windows or Linux.

That being said, during a transition from Watchguard to Juniper as our Security gateway provider (and Force10 to Juniper MX for Routing) a poor assumption made on our part was that the SRX series was supported out of the box by VPN Tracker. This article is being written because it was, and currently is not supported.

For anyone following the Juniper Security track, it is clear from the writers of JunOS Security by O’Reilly that the SRX is being geared to replace the Netscreen and SSG families. ScreenOS will be no more, JunOS is the future for security at Juniper.

Through a combination of many resources including but not limited to Juniper TAC, a third party site to site (not dynamic VPN) windows based IPSec client (which had documented support by JunOS) and a great deal of troubleshooting I was able to engineer a working configuration for IPSec connectivity from VPN Tracker to an SRX endpoint.

Lets start by saying the standard proposal set should not be used. This was my first glimmer into not using default sets within JunOS. This essentially predefines a set of criteria to be used for the proposal to have a conversation and engage with the endpoint. Specifically:

standard - Standard set of two set of IKE proposals: Proposal 1— Preshared key, 3DES encryption, and Diffie-Hellman Group 2 and SHA-1 authentication. Proposal 2—Preshared key, Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 128-bit encryption, and Diffie-Hellman Group 2 and SHA-1 authentication.

Despite all efforts we could not engage in a Proposal 1 agreement within VPN Tracker, initial theory is on the Triple DES encryption. What follows is a documented and working proposal set to use for your Dynamic VPN IPSec configurations within JunOS:

set security zones security-zone Public interfaces ge-X/X/X.X host-inbound-traffic system-services ike
set security ike proposal PSK-AES128-SHA1-DH2 authentication-method pre-shared-keys
set security ike proposal PSK-AES128-SHA1-DH2 dh-group group2
set security ike proposal PSK-AES128-SHA1-DH2 authentication-algorithm sha1
set security ike proposal PSK-AES128-SHA1-DH2 encryption-algorithm aes-128-cbc
set security ike proposal PSK-AES128-SHA1-DH2 lifetime-seconds 28800
set security ike proposal PSK-AES256-SHA1-DH2 authentication-method pre-shared-keys
set security ike proposal PSK-AES256-SHA1-DH2 dh-group group2
set security ike proposal PSK-AES256-SHA1-DH2 authentication-algorithm sha1
set security ike proposal PSK-AES256-SHA1-DH2 encryption-algorithm aes-256-cbc
set security ike proposal PSK-AES256-SHA1-DH2 lifetime-seconds 28800
set security ike policy ike-dyn-vpn-policy mode aggressive
set security ike policy ike-dyn-vpn-policy proposals PSK-AES128-SHA1-DH2
set security ike policy ike-dyn-vpn-policy proposals PSK-AES256-SHA1-DH2
set security ike policy ike-dyn-vpn-policy pre-shared-key ascii-text "XXXX"
set security ike gateway dyn-vpn-local-gw ike-policy ike-dyn-vpn-policy
set security ike gateway dyn-vpn-local-gw dynamic hostname reduxftw
set security ike gateway dyn-vpn-local-gw dynamic connections-limit 10
set security ike gateway dyn-vpn-local-gw dynamic ike-user-type shared-ike-id
set security ike gateway dyn-vpn-local-gw external-interface ge-X/X/X.X
set security ike gateway dyn-vpn-local-gw xauth access-profile dyn-vpn-access-profile
set security ipsec proposal ESP-AES128-SHA protocol esp
set security ipsec proposal ESP-AES128-SHA authentication-algorithm hmac-sha1-96
set security ipsec proposal ESP-AES128-SHA encryption-algorithm aes-128-cbc
set security ipsec proposal ESP-AES128-SHA lifetime-seconds 28800
set security ipsec proposal ESP-AES256-SHA protocol esp
set security ipsec proposal ESP-AES256-SHA authentication-algorithm hmac-sha1-96
set security ipsec proposal ESP-AES256-SHA encryption-algorithm aes-256-cbc
set security ipsec proposal ESP-AES256-SHA lifetime-seconds 28800
set security ipsec policy ipsec-dyn-vpn-policy perfect-forward-secrecy keys group2
set security ipsec policy ipsec-dyn-vpn-policy proposals ESP-AES128-SHA
set security ipsec policy ipsec-dyn-vpn-policy proposals ESP-AES256-SHA
set security ipsec vpn dyn-vpn ike gateway dyn-vpn-local-gw
set security ipsec vpn dyn-vpn ike ipsec-policy ipsec-dyn-vpn-policy

Pretty basic configuration, fill in the X’s where needed and you’ve got viable usage of AES128 or 256.

On the VPN Tracker side simply create a custom profile and fill in your phase 1 and phase 2 settings as appropriate.

Also, don’t forget to insert your Public_Bound source bound natting in front of your last resort source-address with source-nat off.

Lastly, remember that security policies in JunOS flow downward. Ensure your security policy to handle this traffic is in front of any-permit.

Hopefully this helps the next engineer working with similar platforms.

Any questions, I'm thomas@networkredux.com. Cheers.

Virtual Network Performance in Citrix XenServer

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 13:05:42 -0800

A client recently asked us to recommend a proxy (layer 4 and layer 7) that would scale better than the appliance they were using without breaking the bank. I didn't hesitate to point them to haproxy -- it's fast, stable, scalable, widely deployed and well-supported.

Not long after deploying a pair of Dell R610s running haproxy and heartbeat, the client (wisely) initiated some benchmark testing to evaluate the capabilities of their new proxy layer. The results fell far short of their expectations and ours. A pool of several servers only managed 600 -- 700 sessions per second. Worse yet, running the benchmark directly against one server (bypassing the proxy layer) yielded better results, around 700 -- 800 sessions per second. It's a sad day when a single server outperforms a cluster. What could be holding things back?

I first tried to reproduce the inadequate performance in my dev environment. And although the client was using some just-deployed XenServer 6.0 chassis, my dev environment is still on 5.6. But the problem was easily reproduced despite this difference (unfortunately showing that 6.0 has this same capacity limit as 5.6). My test case used a static document of about 10KB, served under Apache 2. The benchmarks were run with ab (from the Apache package), httperf, and siege using various concurrencies and durations. I wasn't overly impressed with httperf, ab got the job done pretty well, and I found siege to work beautifully. Regardless of my personal evaluations of these tools, though, I found that all three agreed fairly closely on the performance capabilities of my test VM: 600 -- 800 sessions per second, depending on the test parameters. In general, low concurrencies yieled moderately acceptable session service rates, but anything above about 50 -- 100 concurrent sessions caused the overall session rate to plunge. Given that the client was starting their tests at 250 concurrent sessions and moving up from there (hoping for at least 1000/s service), this would never suffice.

While running benchmark after benchmark, I poked at various system statics on the VMs involved and saw nothing useful: haproxy running at about 10% CPU (not terrible given that the network driver was for a generic software "NIC"), Apache was peaking at around 30% CPU, iostat and vmstat showing nothing that would limit the service performance. So I poked on the chassis hosting haproxy and found a process eating 70% of the dom0 CPU capacity -- netback. The software network stack in XenServer itself was unable to handle the load the benchmark was generating.

To show definitively that the proxies were not contributing to the problem in any substantial way, I reworked my test setup on the deployed R610 proxies (which were not yet live due to the performance issues). Using the same static test file, Apache 2, and haproxy configuration, sending traffic from one R610 to the other (the latter hosting both Apache and haproxy), I pulled a cool 10000 sessions per second. More than a ten-fold increase! Watching the processes in top(1), I noted that the reported CPU loads were very volatile during a benchmark run. Pinning the processes to specific CPUs helped here. Only one haproxy process was running (despite the R610 having 8 CPU cores), so I pinned it to a single core, Apache to another single core, and top to a third core. This allowed haproxy to break 11000 sessions per second. That's pretty respectable for a 10KB document on a 1Gbe network.

With a spread from 800/s to 10000/s, it's clear that the overhead of the virtualized network is a serious bottleneck. Optimal performance demands minimal overhead!

bks

Time for a much needed update

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 16:16:11 -0700

Keeping our clients and readers up to date has been difficult these last few months given some significant growth within our organization.

Where to begin, well in the last two months the following has occurred:

Network Redux has grown its revenue base by 20% in the last 8 weeks.
We have doubled our capacity in Seattle / Sabey.
Formally launched datacenter presence in New York City with Internap (NYM008).
With our launch in NYC we are offering coast to coast SAN replication for Enterprise Clients.
Marked our 7th year of business as of September 18th.
Made a significant change in vendors for routing and security by consolidating these requirements into Juniper's MX and SRX series.
Now hosting a local and well known www.webtrends.com
Deployed significant changes and feature enhancements to our user Dashboard.

All of this fruit coming to bear while maintaining 100% ownership of our organization.

I am extremely proud of our talented team and welcome in our 8th year of business.

Cheers,

Thomas Brenneke, President Network Redux, LLC

Hiring Devops

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 14:58:29 -0700

Good news for our readers, followers and customers. We are actively hiring additional Devop oriented folks at our Portland, Oregon based HQ.

Those apply for these positions should find comfort in the following platforms:

Ruby / Perl
MySQL / Postgresql
Mongo / Redis / Riak
RHEL / CentOS / Ubuntu
Citrix XenServer
JunOS

This is a W-2 full time position working from our Portland offices in John's Landing.

With hard work comes many rewards, including but not limited to:

Comprehensive medical, vision and dental insurance
Flex-time
Parking / Commute expenses covered
Fault tolerant whiteboards (n+1)
Organizational performance based bonuses

Please send messages directly to myself [thomas] @ {networkredux}.com.

Network Redux Introduces Redux Referral

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 14:51:11 -0700

We want to thank you, our awesome clients, for helping spread the word about Network Redux.

Starting immediately, we will send you a $10 gift card for every friend you refer that signs up for a free, no obligation Network Redux Dashboard account. If your friend purchases a Network Redux VS or EVS, we’ll generously reward you with cash or service credits.

How to participate in the Network Redux Referral Program:

Sign into your Network Redux Dashboard
Click the “Referral Program” tab on the left side of your dashboard screen.
Send your personalized referral link (located on the top right of the screen) to all of your friends. (Note: Your friend must visit our site using your personalized referral link to get credit.)
Receive and spend your $10 gift card to Amazon.

It’s that easy. Really.

Start telling your friends about Network Redux right now!

Do you have a Social Media Company Guide?

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 13:58:18 -0700

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been preparing a written marketing strategy document for Network Redux. I was trained in Public Relations and Journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and spent the majority of my career in a marketing and public relations firm. Thus, I have a very systematic approach when implementing long-term marketing strategies.

Right now I am working on the social media portion of the plan and developing a social media guide for Network Redux. If you don’t have a formal Social Media Company Guide and you have more than two employees working at your company, I suggest you spend some time thinking about official guidelines to Tweet/post by.

Below are a few highlights from our Social Media Company Guide. I’m happy to share the full document as a guide as you create your own. Email me if you are interested.

Keep logins and passwords in one place. Be sure you know where all of your company’s social media account logins and passwords are located. We recently made the rookie mistake of losing the login and password for our Facebook account and had to change our Facebook vanity URL. Keep the passwords and logins close to the Social Media Company Guide to prevent personnel changes from affecting your social networking presence.

Be genuine. Stick to posting and commenting on subjects that are in your area of expertise. You won’t catch me tweeting or blogging on the Anatomy of High Availability or about the technologies behind the Network Redux Dashboard. Luckily I can rely on an amazing team to post some real content rich truffles. Tap into your client base or community if want to blog about something you’re not an expert at. Guest bloggers resonate more with an audience than wanna-be bloggers.

Think before your post. Remember that most social media platforms are just a large, searchable and public message board. Do not post anything that you would not want your largest client, your dream client or your mom to read. I am constantly reminding myself that Twitter is donating its entire archive of public tweets to the Library of Congress.

Criticism is inevitable. Everyone is a critic in the social media realm. Be prepared for someone to say something negative about you or your business. When this happens, DO NOT ENGAGE. Acknowledge the issue publicly and then, if necessary, take conversation with the naysayer off the social media platform. Any sort of public confrontation with a member of your community is unprofessional even if it is behind a computer screen.

What spoken, or unspoken, social media guidelines do you follow? Do you have a formal Social Media Company Guide? If you don’t think one is necessary, why not?

Introducing Brian Shore and #DevOpSec

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 13:44:12 -0700

It comes with great pleasure to announce the most recent addition to Network Redux. Brian Shore, Senior System Architect, and genius.

With his Masters in Computer Science from Cornell University, Brian brings to us tremendous experience in development, operations and platform/programming security.

This addition enhances three critical areas to our organizational fabric, and in turn has resulted in a new tag you will see frequently, #devopsec (follow at twitter/devopsec)

Transparency has been a key ingredient to our success, and as such we will be providing an ongoing dialogue on the platforms and systems we automate, build and deploy to power our operations.

Welcome aboard Brian!

The Maestro behind the Dashboard

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 10:55:04 -0700

Kris Watson joined Network Redux in September of 2010. His primary role? Build tools.

Over the course of several months, new internal tools were built. With a strong background in ruby, many aspects of our organization started to embrace the beauty of Ruby as a language.

Kris then took the lead role in building our automated Dashboard (https://dashboard.networkredux.com) and the underlying service components that power this extremely fast and robust service platform.

What began as an initial project in providing an abstraction layer to the Citrix XenServer API soon turned in to a full blown automation platform for our customer base. With drivers currently written for the Citrix XenServer and Parallels Virtuozzo API's, and VMWare in development, Kris and team have an extremely dynamic living system that is being nurtured on a daily basis. While our competition may have similar platforms, nothing comes close to the speed and versatility to what we are building.

Once an Infrastructure as a Service provider, we are gradually evolving into a Platform as a service Provider. Integrating, Development, Operations and Security into a well tuned team of experts.

July Redux Rockstar: David Gagne

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 09:23:56 -0700

Every month, Network Redux chooses one amazing client to feature in our newsletter and on our blog. If you're interested in being the next Redux Rockstar, contact Sarah at sarah@networkredux.com.

Meet David Gagne

David, tell us about your day job.

I'm the CTO of Brandissimo!, Inc. I spend my days overseeing the information technology involved in all of our projects, which range from the production of children's television shows, cartoons, and DVDs to web sites and games. We basically handle anything related to helping companies manage their brands.

I also do quite a bit of programming in addition to spending hours and hours writing specifications documentation for local and third-party developers, including several teams overseas.

What is your favorite part about job?

The team at Brandissimo!, Inc. is comprised of vibrant and exciting artists. Everyone is a comedian and every day is an adventure. Also, the fact that one of our largest clients is the National Football League is awesome – I’m a huge football fan.

If you were stranded on a desert island, what could you not live without?

Obviously, I could not live without my wife and my 10-month-old son. However, it would be hard to leave my 13,000+ song iTunes library and iPod behind, though the battery wouldn't last very long. So if I had to choose an object to bring, it would be a trusty Swiss-Army knife.

If you had to choose a superpower, what would you choose?

I actually have several super-powers, so this question is always difficult for me. The one I don't have but wish I did is the ability to fly like Superman. Traffic in LA is brutal.

Now, tell us something not many people know about you.

I used to row crew for the University of Florida. I’m also a three-time LA Marathon Finisher. Although I’m not a health nut, I do like to stay active.

You can learn even more about David on his blog that he has continually updated for the past ten years, davidgagne.net. Follow @DavidGagne on Twitter, too!

Network Redux Announces Open API

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 09:02:03 -0700

Network Redux announced the availability of its open API and is inviting members of the community to take advantage of the long-awaited access to the company’s reliable hosting platform.

Users now have control panel and programmable access to Network Redux’s Dashboard, adding another way for the developer to control the web hosting experience.

“We’re a company built by system architects and engineers,” says Kris Watson, Vice President of Engineering. “We know the value of an API because our own fabric is built using a multitude of APIs. We’ve taken the valuable features of our Dashboard and opened them up for developers to leverage in building their own platforms and services.”

Network Redux is a developer-focused provider of Managed Service Provider. The company operates three secure data centers where it deploys and manages the entire stack using its own vendor-certified hardware that includes Dell servers, Equallogic Storage, Force10 Networking, and Watchguard Security. Headquarter in Portland, Ore., Network Redux is built with the best breed System Architects and Engineers.

Learn more about Network Redux’s API

Anatomy of High Availability: Dell Equallogic Storage

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 16:01:54 -0700

Dell Equallogic is our chosen vendor for SAN storage within our Enterprise platforms. We leverage both the PS6000XV and PS4000 models for different purposes.

Our PS6000XV models are used for our Enterprise client production storage pools, and our E-VS Citrix XenServer pools. Our PS4000 usage is primarily for offsite asynchronous replication which we provide to all of our Enterprise customers.

Today is an excellent example of the Equallogic platform handling an event failure, dispatching notifications and self-healing.

Disk 7 of the array unit went into a failure status, the Equallogic group immediately replaced this disk with a hot spare from the member array (each Equallogic keeps 2 hot spares per chassis). Immediately following began a rebuild of the RAID-10 degradation and an email report to our Operations and the Dell Equallogic support group.

Keeping mission critical support services on our Equallogic PS6000XV’s Dell’s internal Operations team had a ticket opened before we were able to call in and dispatch a request for resolution.

Here are before and after pictures of the array, as we all love to look at pictures.

Network Redux services now extend to the E.U.

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 15:31:34 -0700

Dear Customers and Loyal Readers,

Today marks a monumental day for Network Redux. We have officially launched facilities and operations within the E.U.

Within our automated Dashboard, clients may now select between our Portland, Oregon and Amsterdam datacenters. Customers utilizing our API will now have region selection in their automation workflow.

As well, we are pleased to now provide support for Ubuntu 11.04 inclusive of this regional support offering. These templates are available immediately from all regions.

We are also very pleased to announce that this regional addition includes Enterprise Private Clouds. Service availability is no longer restricted to a single continent.

I’d like to thank the entire Network Redux team from Operations to Development for a job well done. Stay tuned for more ground breaking services and features for both existing and new customers.

Thomas Brenneke
President and Lead Architect
Network Redux, LLC

Anatomy of High Availability: VRRP on Force10 FTOS

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 09:38:49 -0700

High Availability, shortened as HA more often than not, is the concept of N+1 or greater service availability in a datacenter/computing environment. This post will begin a series on High Availability related to Network Redux infrastructure.

One basic, yet underestimated component to the stack is the distribution layer. In our world the distribution layer often participates in a collapsed core environment, distributing network packets downstream to a pair of clustered firewall appliances.

Within the distribution layer we utilize the open standard Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol. For Cisco Engineers you will also have the Cisco flavor with HSRP.

VRRP is a powerful tool in the HA war chest for system architects. From a 30,000 ft. review, it provides a floating default gateway address between two active routers in a network. Though an important point to consider, from a layer-1/layer-2 perspective these are both active and viable paths, hence you may see egress traffic leave your network over the secondary/backup interface. This is more common than not in my experience.

In our network VRRP is delivered via our Top of the Rack (ToR) Force10 Switches. Here is a sample configuration for what we will call sr-0-1 and sr-0-2, where sr-0-1 will be acting as the primary/master. For posterity I have chosen an unused public network subnet within our network.

sr-0-1

interface Vlan 100
description client-net-68-233-0-0-24
ip address 68.233.0.2/24
tagged Port-channel 1
untagged GigabitEthernet 2/43
!
vrrp-group 100
description client-vrrp-68-233-0-0-24
virtual-address 68.233.0.1
priority 110
no shutdown
!

sr-0-2

interface Vlan 100
description client-net-68-233-0-0-24
ip address 68.233.0.3/24
tagged Port-channel 1
untagged GigabitEthernet 2/43
!
vrrp-group 100
description client-vrrp-68-233-0-0-24
virtual-address 68.233.0.1
no shutdown
!

A couple of assumptions are made in this design:

1) Both downstream interfaces are connected to interface 2/43 on each respective switch/router.

2) 68.233.0.0/24 is a routed and recognized network within this architecture.

3) A port-channel of some form exists for communication to take place between sr-0-1 and sr-0-2. Broken communication would result in both sides indicating themselves to be master.

Lets break down some of the segments for a deeper understanding as to what these instructions will accomplish:

1) We provide vlan 100 with an IP address in the network segment for communication between these routed interfaces. Some will argue VRRP is not a layer-3 protocol, the happy medium is to call it a protocol between Layer2/3, it doesn’t really have a formal home.

2) virtual IP address is the floating gateway that will be used by the downstream devices as their default gateway.

3) description nomenclature is just based on best practices at Network Redux.

4) priority 110 will provide that interface with a higher priority as the default priority is 100. If we wanted to delegate sr-0-2 to master a simply priority 90 command would adjust this setting. VRRP in this type of design is so fast it would barely, if at all be noticed as a failover.

With this configuration live, the following would be seen from a show vrrp brief command:

sr-0-1

Interface Grp Pri Pre State Master addr Virtual addr(s) Description
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Vl 100 100 110 Y Master 68.233.0.2 68.233.0.1 client-vrrp-68-233-0-0-24

sr-0-2

Interface Grp Pri Pre State Master addr Virtual addr(s) Description
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Vl 100 100 100 Y Backup 68.233.0.2 68.233.0.1 client-vrrp-68-233-0-0-24

And there you have it, a redundant distribution layer. In our world we bypass the access layer and distribute directly to our servers or security appliances. Most common would be a set of redundant firewalls in active/passive mode.

This configuration syntax is specific to the Force10 Operating System (FTOS), but VRRP as a protocol is open and widely used across all switching/routing vendors in the industry.

Technologies behind our Dashboard and Website

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 14:13:40 -0700

I've had quite a few requests to go into detail about the technologies we use to power our website and our automated dashboard, so today I'd like to go into detail about that.

Website

Our website is a custom CMS that I built on top of the Sinatra framework. I chose Sinatra for a couple reason: 1) I am a ruby developer, so it's very easy for me to build it exactly how i want it to work, and 2) it's an incredibly lightweight and easy to manage framework.

Most of the pages are static erb templates, while our blog and answers are stored in MongoDB. If you're not familiar with mongo, I highly recommend you look into it; it's a very fast and scalable document-based database.

Composing our blog posts and answers is done using markdown with the redcarpet ruby gem.

Searching on both the blog and answers section is handled by taking all of words in the body & title of the post and create an array of keywords.

Example:

title = title.gsub(/<\/?[^>]*>/, "").gsub(/\W+/, ' ').downcase
content = content.gsub(/<\/?[^>]*>/, "").gsub(/W+/, ' ').downcase
keywords = (title + ' ' + content).split.uniq

This may seem a little 'messy', but it actually works quite nicely. I do some other logic behind the scenes to take out words like 'the' and 'a' to cut out some fat.

Dashboard

Our dashboard is made up of a collection of technologies and languages. The main application is a Rails 3 app running on nginx and Passenger.

When designing the main architecture, we chose to build the app to leverage queuing as much as possible so the user experience would always be fast.

Queue

For queuing, were using Resque which uses the Redis database, and this is monitored with god. To learn more about this, here is a great blog post that the Resque developers put out: https://github.com/blog/542-introducing-resque.

From within the application, all orders, device changes (resize, restart, shutdown, etc), reverse dns, and email are queued up. This is mainly why our dashboard is so quick. It also allows us to handle errors very gracefully, if a worker fails to complete it's job for whatever reason, we can deal with that transparently behind the scenes; the customer doesn't need to be involved in that process.

Provisioning

Provisioning of the VM is handled by a perl driver I wrote to speak with our virtualization platform. Even though I'm by no means a perl developer, I chose perl for it's speed and socket connections. The perl driver spits out the raw data for the ruby-based worker to process the response. In internal testing, we found that this method was substantially faster over letting ruby make the socket requests.

Device Metrics

All of our device metrics are done by a separate set of workers polling all of the devices every few minutes, and then storing that data into MongoDB.

Were using the Highcharts graphing engine to generate our graphs.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at kris at networkredux.com

Network Redux Offers VPS for Fifty Cents a Day

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 13:47:54 -0700

Today, Network Redux announced a new line of VPS for only $10 a month. The new service, dubbed “VS0”, offers 256MB of RAM and an array of features that offers users unprecedented control of their virtual servers.

All Network Redux VPS packages, including the new VS0, are managed through an automated dashboard that allows the user to spin-up and down the virtual server on-demand as well as reboot, start and stop the VS instantly. Additional management features include forward and reverse DNS control and a full-featured API.

New Relic, a product that allows for monitoring and troubleshooting Ruby, PHP, Java and Python apps in real-time comes standard with the Network Redux VS0 subscription. This tool provides immediate insight, down to the line of code, from the end user’s behavior, adding another layer of monitoring and control available to Network Redux’s customers.

“VS0 is ideal for boutique-scale websites that are looking for a quality web hosting provider. These customers have access to the same features available in our larger packages at a fraction of the cost,” says Kris Watson, Vice President of Engineering at Network Redux. “The internet belongs to all of us; our goal is to provide quality hosting to make every site shine.”

Network Redux is a developer-focused provider of Managed Linux hosting solutions. The company operates three secure data centers where it deploys and manages the entire stack using its own vendor-certified hardware that includes Dell servers, Dell Equalogic Sans, Force10 switches, and Watchguard firewalls. Headquarter in Portland, Ore., Network Redux is made up of top-notch engineers from around the world.

Interested in learning more about the fifty cent a day VPS? Visit www.networkredux.com/web-hosting/virtual-servers

Network Redux Unveils Instant VPS Resize Without Reboot

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 14:19:44 -0700

Network Redux released a new feature yesterday that allows developers to resize the virtual server without rebooting.

This is one more way that Network Redux is striving to give developers unprecedented control and flexibility.

Available on Network Redux's customer dashboard, users can increase resources within seconds without having to reboot, keeping websites up and running during heavy traffic.

"We're changing expectations. I work directly with our clients and know exactly what they are looking for," said Thomas Brenneke, Network Redux's President. "We know the demands of the community and are able to deliver the tools at a rapid rate."

Network Redux is a developer-focused provider of Managed Linux hosting solutions. The company operates three secure data centers where it deploys and manages the entire stack using its own vendor-certified hardware that includes Dell PowerEdge Servers, Equallogic Storage, Force10 Routing and Switching and Watchguard Security Appliances. Headquarter in Portland, Ore., Network Redux is made up of top-notch engineers around the world.

Explore the instant resize option yourself: http://www.networkredux.com/web-hosting/virtual-servers

Resize VM Without Restarting

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 16:06:25 -0700

Today we launched a new feature of our dashboard that allows you to upgrade/downgrade your Virtual Server on-demand, WITHOUT rebooting!

To use this great new feature, signup here: https://dashboard.networkredux.com

New Relic Delivers the Goods

Tue, 17 May 2011 13:39:19 -0700

It comes with great pleasure to publicly applaud our partners, New Relic, for their recent series of updates to their platform.

While the details can be viewed on a wide range of news sources, most notably: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-20063415-62.html we are extremely pleased to be partnered with such an innovative organization.

Integrating New Relic with our products and services has allowed our customers and engineers with an in depth layer to application performance. No longer held down by the typical linux userland tools such as vmstat, strace and gdb, we now have concrete data points and graphical representation of this data to analyze. These tools provide both customer and service provider with a layer never before provided in such a nicely fit package.

A round of applause to the New Relic team, a job very well done.