Posts Tagged ‘API’

I ain’t afraid of no bathtub. Or rather I wasn’t afraid of no bathtub. Seventy two hours and twelve hundred dollars ago, I wasn’t afraid of the bathtub, toilet or sink. Now I’m not so sure. What am I talking about? Perhaps I better start at the beginning.

A few weeks ago, I had a general contractor come out to my house. One of my bathrooms was in pretty bad shape and I wanted to give it a face lift. I figured it was a small job. New sink, new toilet, new tub. Splash some paint on the walls. Throw down some tiles. Viola!

The contractor, let’s call him Al, came highly recommended from a buddy of mine who recently had some work done. Al spent about 20 minutes looking at my bathroom, (which I thought was about 10 minutes too long considering we’re talking about a 6 foot by 8 foot room), and then asked if he could sit down at my kitchen table. He pulled out a number two pencil, yellow pad, and a calculator, then began scribbling.

When he was finished he passed the tablet my way, and somewhere near the bottom of the page circled a couple times for emphasis was: 6K. I don’t come from a long line of mathematical wizards, (see http://blog.softlayer.com/2008/everybody-knows-sevens-and-nines-dont-figure/), but if six times eight equals forty-eight that comes out to something like $125 per square foot.

“Thanks for your time,” I said, handed Al back his notebook, and showed him to the door.

The following weekend, my son and I went up to Lowe’s. We needed some light bulbs. Well it just so happens that within rock throwing distance of the light bulbs were the bathtubs. And don’t you know once we walked in that direction, we were within eyeshot of the sinks, toilets, vanities, you get the idea.

Quickly, (okay moderately), I began adding up the raw materials in my head. Tub, sink, toilet, light fixtures, I could easily get everything I needed for about a grand. I was inspired. I’m reasonably bright, semi-competent with a hammer, and come to think of it, among other things my grandfather was a plumber for a number of years. Surely that’s the sort of thing handed down generation to generation through DNA—right?

At some point I must have gotten “that look” in my eyes because my son asked which tub we were getting, and could we hurry up please so he didn’t miss “Minute to Win It”.

As with any project, I think it’s best to break a job down into manageable chunks, and as I saw it, there were five obvious tasks at hand: the tub, the toilet, the sink, the walls, and the floor. I started with the tub, because quite frankly the idea of knocking ceramic tiles off the shower wall with a hammer sounded like a blast.

It was fun too. So much so that my son turned off the TV in the living room, opting to get a hammer of his own and help. The dog even ventured as far as the threshold to see what all the commotion was and for about twenty minutes tiles were raining down, and hammers were thwacking, and I was thinking to myself: six thousand dollars my butt—I should charge for the pleasure of demolishing my wall. That’s when I noticed an unpleasant odor.

I looked at my son, who was looking at me, and then we both turned and looked at the dog who promptly let out a whimper and ran off in search of breathable air. The odor quickly elevated itself to the title of stench and the adjective unpleasant was upgraded to down-right-nasty. At the risk of permanent blindness I poked my head into the hole where the drywall had been.

My eyes were watering and it was too dark to see. Knowing a lighter in this situation was not the way to go I sent my son for a flashlight. Even with the flashlight I could find nothing to explain the foul odor and when stuffing the holes with rags and shutting off the room failed to alleviate the level red pollution watch that rapidly spread throughout the house, my son, the dog, and myself were forced to evacuate and check into a hotel.

It took the plumber six hours at weekend rates to cap off the leak, and two more days to actually repair the problem. Including the night at the hotel, my experiment in bathroom remodeling has tallied up to just about twelve hundred dollars. And really, considering my original task break down, I’ve only completed 1/5th of the job. As I already mentioned, I don’t come from a long line of mathematical wizards, (if you missed it the first time see http://blog.softlayer.com/2008/everybody-knows-sevens-and-nines-dont-figure/), but twelve hundred times five is 6K.

I guess what I’ve learned is that sometimes you have to call in the pros and just maybe extend a little trust—especially if that pro comes highly recommended. I’m a wiz when it comes to programming low-level utilities, system software, and drivers. That’s why SoftLayer hired me. But I’m no plumber.

My point is each of us has our own area of expertise. We can’t all be everything, and the same is true when it comes to a business. Whatever your business is, you are undoubtedly good at it. But take it from me you can’t be an expert at everything.

SoftLayer comes highly recommended, do a simple Google search and you’ll find customer after customer raving about our support, our reliable network, our flexible API. And we know Information Technologies inside and out. We have hardware engineers, software engineers, support engineers, and some of the most knowledgeable sales folks I’ve ever met anywhere.

Sometimes it just makes more sense to concentrate on your core competencies. The next time you require dedicated computing resources or cloud services, pick up the phone and give SoftLayer a call. You’ll be glad you did. Oh, and the next time you need a plumber, well, I have a guy for that too I can recommend these days.

I often get asked “what makes SoftLayer different?” The problem with that simple question is – SoftLayer is so different from all the competition out there that it’s not a simple question to answer. I have my standard version that I run thru – but I’m not sure people really grasp how different SoftLayer really is. After talking to my wife, she recommended doing a Letterman style top 10 reason why SoftLayer is different. I figured I would give it a shot – so here it is..

10. SoftLayer terminates 40Gbps to every single rack!! 20Gbps to the public internet and 20Gbps to the private network.
9. SoftLayer offers three types of VPN services for out-of-band connectivity (SSL, PPTP, IPSEC)
8. SoftLayer manages its own nationwide MPLS network with 10 PoPs and over 1000Gbps of transit and peer connectivity
7. SoftLayer offers free enterprise grade DNS services through our DNS farms located in all 10 PoPs in North America
6. SoftLayer has over 1600 APIs for custom integration, a full service control panel for ease of use and a private label option for resellers
5. Every single server in every datacenter is a rackmount, hotswap, tool-less chassis offering enterprise grade hardware with ultra-fast modifications
4. SoftLayer has downloadable iPhone, Android and Blackberry apps in addition to our mobile phone friendly .mobi site for complete control.
3. Only hybrid solution available – dedicated, virtualized, and cloud instances operating in a single environment and control thru a single interface or API
2. Private Network – connect any server to any other server in any datacenter with a click of a button
1. Fastest service delivery

• Over 1000 servers in stock
• Dedicated servers – 4 hours or less
• Servers with virtualization – 2 hours or less
• Cloud instances & storage – 5 to 15 minutes
• Firewalls, Load Balancers, SAN Storage – added real time w/ no downtime

-@lavosby

Our API has gone through more than a few changes since the middle of 2006 when it was first released in beta to a few of our customers. Since then, it has grown from a handful of available features to your one stop shop for infrastructure automation needs. Providing all the functionality our customer portal has, plus putting automation in your/the customers’ hands that was only dreamed of a few short years ago. We have a few NEW note worthy features we just released concerning the API that numerous people have asked for. So here goes:

1. Opened the API up to the public network

We now have two ways to access the SoftLayer API. The first is the same method you have been using utilizing our private network. Some developers have asked for a way to bypass the VPN and private network. So we have added a publicly accessible entry point for the API in addition to the private network. This should open up your development to new exciting desktop widgets and consumption of our API for external software projects without requiring the VPN overhead. More information is available in the SLDN wiki.

2. RESTful web services

We added a simple Representational State Transfer (REST) interface to the arsenal of already supported SOAP and XML-RPC protocols. REST is great if you want to perform simple requests that do not require the complexity of SOAP and for simple integration into AJAX related operations on web pages.

3. New documentation

We have just revised our documentation located in the SLDN wiki. We added more examples, updated connection information for public access and usage for our new REST protocol support. We have also been busy working on our growing collection of open source projects.

4. New Code Samples

As you may or may not have heard Softlayer has a github account now. We are uploading projects and examples as fast as we can. You might want to check out Stratos a white label portal example, Client libraries for Python, Perl and PHP, as well as our growing gist examples which outline common tasks requested by customers.

We would love to hear any feature requests you are looking for, so let us hear from you.

In this industry, it seems very easy to get in the rut of looking forward without stopping to take the time and look back. Whether it is a project deadline or just planning for the future, past accomplishments sometimes get lost in the day to day workload. I remember back on January 23rd of 2006—exactly four years ago tomorrow—when we opened the doors. We had 17 employees and around 1,000 servers in our one and only Dallas server room. With just 17 employees you can imagine we wore many hats, and I will not miss or take for granted prepping racks such as putting cage nuts or rails in ever again.
From our humble beginnings, things grew at a rapid pace to say the least. Over the last four years, we have grown to 175 employees, 25,000+ servers spanning facilities in Dallas, Seattle, and Washington D.C. and just recently passed $100 million annualized run rate mark. Not too shabby for four years, if I do say so myself.
The product and service offering have grown at an astounding pace as well. Thanks in part, I think, to our API—launched publicly in May of 2007. Was that over two years ago? It seems like yesterday. On top of that, there have been too many individual products to list here. Some highlights would fall into the areas of: CloudLayer, StorageLayer, backup solutions, and security solutions—just to name a few!
Looking forward I think 2010 is going to be a big year for SoftLayer, not that the past years haven’t been. I cannot get into any details; but, as usual there are big plans on the horizon, and you know we aren’t planning on slowing down anytime soon. Looking back, it has been a packed and crazy four years, but I would not trade it for anything.

An API (application programming interface) is an interface that allows software programs to communicate with each other. The communication barrier between programs has become thinner as APIs have evolved over the recent decades, like our languages have over the years. At SoftLayer, we have plenty of opportunities to interact with many different APIs from various companies. Some of us work with a driver API, some work with SOAP, or some work with XML-RPC for some projects. If you’re our customer, I bet you can easily imagine the number of APIs we use by looking at the products and services we offer. Not only are we a large API consumer, but we also provide a great number of APIs to our own customers. It seems that the interaction between software programs evolves just like our lives.

It’s hard to survive alone in this world. We are social beings, and we need others for interaction. A software program pretty much works the same way. There is no program that is a know-it-all or do-it-all. If there were one like that, I would not have a job. Software can expand its capabilities by working with other programs just like we, as humans, help each other. APIs act as a communication tool like our languages; and, by the way, there are many dialects too.

When a program starts to interact with another through API, it can be compared to a marriage. They are stuck together. However, programs can marry many others. When two programs start to interact, one cannot change its API without the other knowing. It would be as if your wife started talking to you in Danish all of a sudden. Even a small change in an API can cause a very bad outcome. Imagine that your wife told you to throw your socks in the laundry basket and you have been following this rule for years. Can you imagine what would happen if you left your socks by the bed one day? No, it simply wouldn’t work. If you really need to change the rule, it’s time to consider a divorce, in other words, API version 2. As I mentioned, a program can have multiple partners and you can’t expect them to follow new rules all at once. Your best bet would be to write a version 2 and keep the original version for old times’ sake. Trust me, people are very hesitant when it comes to changing their routine, including me. (Why should I touch a working program just because you updated YOUR API?)

Most APIs that I have used and seen are wonderful. I have seen APIs that work like a jack-of-all-trades, trying to do everything for me, but I didn’t like it. I would not like a BLT with onions, eggs and mustard. I just wanted a B.L.T, period! I have also seen APIs that require too many prerequisite steps (invocations) to get a simple result. How many times must you get transferred until you finally get someone to help with your phone bill? Jeez!

Ok, enough of these funny comparisons. I, a biased user, have listed below what I think is a good API:

• A good API should not change often. If change is inevitable, it should give you plenty of notice and allow backward compatibility.
• A good API should explain why it couldn’t work instead of the infamous “Error: -1”.
• A good API should have good documentation, so you’re not left scratching your head.
• A good API is accessible by different platforms.
• A good API should be stable.
• A good API should be simple and comprehensive. It should do what it says it does and it should do it well. Prefer “powerOn()” over “powerOnWhenIdleAndStartServices()”.

A good API implies the readiness of communication with other programs and other companies. It will broaden opportunities for your programs and organization to work with others, just like a person with good communication skills has a better chance of fitting in our society.

It’s the holiday season, and that means everyone is getting busier. On top of all the existing responsibilities, millions of people are going shopping for gifts, decorating their houses, and navigating the bad weather. On top of all that, many people take their time off during the holiday season!

With this kind of time crunch, it’s best for your business to lie low until after the new year, right? Not so! With all this buying, selling, and giving going on, there’s a lot of extra retail data to process. Plus, it’s the end of the calendar year, many businesses have to get their finances in order too. ALSO, all these newly purchased electronic devices are soon going to be turned on and hooked up to the Internet, where they will almost surely put a new load on your servers.

Systems and network administrators need to be prepared for this influx of new traffic. Sometimes, this means purchasing new servers. However, it’s inefficient to buy the servers so far in advance when you don’t yet know what you will need. It’s best to wait until you’re sure you will need more servers and how many to order. At another hosting company, that would be a problem. People in our industry take the holidays off, too. Lowering the number of sales people and technicians and raising the number of new server requests would normally result in a disaster.

Luckily, SoftLayer does automatic provisioning. As soon as you order your server, it will be provisioned in two to four hours. Day or night, June 3rd or December 31st, if we have it, you can have control over it in two to four hours.

And therein lies the beauty of the SoftLayer system. You don’t have to wait for US to scale your business. If you need another server, get it. When it’s ready, it will automatically be added to your account’s private network and be available to you. You can even automate your server configuration and setup. Depending on the amount of data you need to transfer to a new server, you can have another server up and running your website less than 5 hours from the time you realized you needed it.

In fact, by using the SoftLayer API (and some clever configuration scripts on your servers) you can do live scaling on your website. Using the API, you can provision new servers exactly like the ones you already have. Once they’re available, a script can mirror the configurations from an existing machine to the new machine. Use the SoftLayer API once more to add the new servers to your load balancer rotation, and you’re in business! All without relying on any humans, even yourself! Treat yourself to some R&R this holiday season, while your website continues to get things done for you.

Next week a crowd of SoftLayer peeps are making the H-Town connection at cPanel Conference 2009. Representatives from the support, operations, sales, development, and management teams will be out in full force meeting, greeting, and learning. The conference is from Monday Oct 5 to Wednesday Oct 7 at the Hilton Americas Houston Hotel. Stop by our booth if you’d like to chat. We’re throwing a reception for our awesome customers and partners at the lobby bar on Monday at 9pm. If that’s not enough, yours truly will be giving a talk on Tuesday about how to extend cPanel and WHM through a 3rd party API. Y’all get three guesses as to whose API we’re showing off. Bring your ripest fruits and vegetables and ready your air horns. It’s been a while since I’ve had a good, old-fashioned heckling.

Come on out if you can make it. We love getting to know the folks who pay our salaries. See you there!

I’ve been reducing my calorie intake, as I’m a bit overweight. However, lately I’ve noticed that my weight, which has been trending downward, has taken a bit of a stall. I’ve been trying to figure out why. And I think I have.

Movies.

I love movie theater popcorn. And there have been so many good movies lately! I’ve enjoyed Get Smart, I loved Speed Racer, smiled at Hancock, and have seen Wall-E three times!

And each time I buy a bag of popcorn.

That racks up to a lot of popcorn this summer season.

See, Hollywood complained for years that people just aren’t watching movies. Maybe the movie industry is dying? Violent videogames are taking away the marketshare! Or maybe people just don’t appreciate ART anymore.

Then a giant alien fleet landed and replaced everyone in Hollywood with doubles. But the doubles weren’t perfect, see, because these doubles have done something that no Hollywood executive has thought to do for years.

THEY’RE MAKING MOVIES PEOPLE WANT TO SEE!

It’s like suddenly somebody realized; hey, people have to WANT to see Hancock before they go see it! People want well made movies with plot and character development! People want more than just whizbang special effects and cheap jokes! And they started making it! And they started making tons of money again.

Same thing SoftLayer does, you see. We built a network which CUSTOMERS want, even though it’s a bit more difficult to make. We buy servers that CUSTOMERS want, instead of cheaper servers that we can buy in bulk. We’ve bundled the kind of bandwidth providers that CUSTOMERS want, instead of buying cheap bandwidth so we can have big bandwidth numbers. We built a world class control panel, and then added an API for people who want even more control.

And guess what? Customers are buying our stuff.

Huh. Who knew.

I wonder if we have any popcorn in the break room.

-Shawn

It was the day of the big secret meeting. All my vice presidents were there except for the unix system administrator. He was a strange man, always wearing that robe, with the long beard and long hair. He considered himself some sort of wizard, and after the conflict last month when we decided to switch all our servers over to SoftLayer, I really didn’t want him involved in the meeting I called today. You see, I called it so I could announce my plan to switch our servers over to Windows. My goal was really to get rid of him; he’s the only one who ever managed to thwart my plans.

Just as I finished that thought, he burst through the door, trailing a long ribbon of old-fashioned printer paper behind him. “How dare you have a systems meeting without me!” he intoned, dropping his stack of papers on the conference table in front of me. A quick glance at the stack tells me that he has printed out operating statistics for every version of Unix and every version of Windows going back to 1985. I didn’t have time for this. Luckily, I always have a back up plan.

Turning away slightly, I quickly activated a program on my Blackberry. You see, yesterday I had written a few custom programs that utilize the SoftLayer API to control a variety of our services. Within moments, a confirmation had appeared on my screen. All of our web traffic had been redirected from our load balanced main servers to our tertiary backup server. In the middle of the work day, that means it was only a matter of minutes before our bandwidth would be exceeded on that server. I allowed the sysadmin to begin his presentation, confident that he would barely get past the 8086 before disaster stuck.

I was right! Within minutes, an email arrived notifying us that we were nearing the bandwidth cap on the hostname last_resort. Panicked, the sysadmin left the meeting. Quickly I summarized my plans to the other VPs, we all voted unanimously for Windows, and I retreated to my office. Shortly after sitting behind my desk, my door burst open. Framed in the light from the hallway, his long shadow washing over me, stood the sysadmin, slowly twirling his staff. “Do you think you can stop me with a simple change to our load balancer? I was configuring load balancers when you were still on dial-up! Now, you will listen, AOL user, and you will see why Unix is your only choice!” Of course, I had a backup plan for just such a situation.

I dove out the window next to my desk, landing nimbly next to my secretary’s bright pink LeBaron. I had made copies of all her keys months ago in order to utilize her unique vehicle for any necessary escapes. I quickly tapped out a text message to Michael in SoftLayer sales. We have a standing agreement that when he receives a message from me containing only the word DAWT, he is to send the best sale at his disposal to my sysadmin. As I drove past the front door of the building I saw him running toward the car. He pulled out his Blackberry in mid-stride and suddenly stopped dead. “Free double RAM AND double hard drives!? IMPOSSIBLE!” he screamed, and I managed to swerve around him and escape. As I drove away, I thought about my secretary. When she first started here, I had convinced her that if her car were ever stolen, the best plan of action would be to change the building security policies so that only my badge could open the doors. I hoped I didn’t need to make use of that plan, but the sysadmin has proved a worthy adversary.

Unbelievable! Even with my masterful backup plan, he was still following me. I saw his battered VW Bus merge into traffic behind me, his vulture-like shadow looming behind the wheel. I sped up until we were both racing down the road, weaving in and out of the other vehicles. Finally we passed a police car, and my next plan sprang into action. I knew that standard procedure was to radio in the vehicles you were pursuing, and I knew my friend Joe was on duty today. Joe knew that if he ever received a radio call about a business man in a pink LeBaron being chased down the highway by a wizard in a VW Bus, he was to call off the police and park a fire truck at a certain intersection. You see, I had hired an actor to pretend to be a corporate Psychiatrist, and learned that the Sysadmin had an irrational fear of fire trucks. Why? Because it always pays to have a backup plan.

I angled toward the intersection and managed to squeeze past the truck just as it pulled up to block the street. I heard the squeal of tires as the sysadmin slammed on his breaks and reversed wildly behind me. Now that I was free, however, I couldn’t return to the office. Luckily I was prepared for just such an eventuality. As I drove to my next location, I quickly used my Blackberry to shut down one of our production web servers. I knew that it would be 20 minutes before the monitoring system would officially declare the server “down,” so I had time.

I made it to my secret office above the video arcade not long after. Before leaving the car I collected the grappling hook and rope from a secret compartment in the door, then went inside. I walked in to the darkened room and immediately noticed something was wrong. My security system wasn’t beeping! The door slammed behind me and the sysadmin boomed out “NO PLAN CAN DEFEAT ME, MORTAL!”

“I’m ALWAYS prepared!” I shot back, and quickly glanced at my watch. It had been 19 minutes and 45 seconds since I shut down my server, the timing was perfect! The sysadmin walked toward me, twirling that staff. Just as he was about to reach me, his blackberry beeped. Pausing to check, he let out a stream of curses and then lunged at me, but I had already rappelled down the side of the building and made my escape.

As soon as I reached the car, my Blackberry alerted me that the server I shut down was back up. How!? The sysadmin must have his own API programs! I cringed as I activated my final backup plan: a program that constantly shut down all our servers. Let’s see him handle that! I took the direct route back to the office, past the still-idling fire truck. I threw Joe a wave, knowing that I’d owe him a big favor for this, and rocketed back to the office. I knew that he would be right behind me, but hopefully with all our servers offline he won’t beat me to my destination. Also, once I made it into the building, the security system wouldn’t allow anyone in behind me. I would be safe!

I raced into the building, looking frantically around for the sysadmin, but he was nowhere to be seen. Finally! I had defeated him! I walked calmly to my office and opened the door, only to see HIM, climbing in through my window. I had forgotten to close it when I escaped this morning! I quickly opened the secret panel in the wall next to the door and put my finger on the red button.

“WAIT!” cried the sysadmin. “We need to put our differences behind us. Our plans have almost destroyed our servers!”

“What do you mean?” I demanded. “They’re fine!”

“No, they’re not,” he said in a sad voice. “You see, I always have a backup plan, and I knew that eventually someone would attempt to power off our machines, so I wrote a script to constantly turn the machines on!”

“B-but…” I stammered, “but I wrote a script to constantly turn them OFF”

“I know” he said, “and the constant power cycling has corrupted our data base. We need to set aside this silly feud and fix it.”

“Don’t worry, dear end user” I proudly proclaimed, “I always have a backup-“

It was right then I realized that in all my planning, I had never actually created any backups.

-Daniel

Wal-Mart! Champion of Retail! Who else can build a large brick box, paint it blue, stuff it with stuff, and make money hand over fist? What is the source of this power? Many will say it’s their sheer size. However, this isn’t true! Because what many people forget is that Wal-Mart had to start with one single store, just like every other retailer in America. So what is their secret?

INFRASTRUCTURE!

It’s been said that Wal-Mart can track a single apple from the tree to the front of the store. Every piece of inventory is logged and tracked from pickup to delivery. Every single bottle of aspirin, every sock, every donut is duly logged and mashed up in massive data warehouses where giant computers munch the data and produce useful reports. You know what the most popular item is at Wal-Mart? According to an employee friend of mine, in the Cedar Creek Lake Area of North Texas, it’s Bananas. They know how many bananas are sold, when they were sold, what the best day of the week is for banana sales, and which cashier is responsible for the most banana sales during a month. They can track banana sales over time, by store, region, trucking company, banana producer, you name it. They know which employee was on duty in the fresh fruit aisle when banana sales were high, and which employee used to be on duty in the fresh fruit aisle when banana sales were low. It’s all in there, if you want it.

However, Wal-Mart had to build this technology from scratch. They had to install special data systems in their distribution centers. They had to build their own server farms, lease their own data lines… did you know Wal-Mart has it’s own SATELLITE NETWORK?!? The Wal-Mart Satellite Network is one of the largest private satellite systems in the world, carrying real time data from every single Wal-Mart store and distribution center to Wal-Mart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, where it is poured into their massive data warehouse. They can plan, instantly, to take care of overstocks and shortfalls at every store, as soon as it happens.

You don’t need to build your own satellite network to get competition crushing infrastructure today. Using the technology solutions provided by SoftLayer, and simple connections to the Internet, you too can have the type of infrastructure necessary to succeed in today’s business world. We provide world class servers for your number crunching, huge amounts of networked storage for your data warehouse, geographically diverse datacenters for disaster security, and a private network that allows you to tie it all together as blazing high speeds. Using our awesome API 3.0, you can automate just about every part of maintaining your infrastructure. Leveraging the Internet, you can build data portals that allow your partners to keep you up to date on production, to plan finances, track bananas, whatever you want to do!

We’ve already taken care of the hard work required to build the infrastructure. Now all you have to do is leverage it.

-Shawn