Posts Tagged ‘application’

Building an API is a bit of a balancing act. You want your API to be simple and easy to use, and you want it to be feature-rich and completely customizable. Because those two desires happen to live on opposite ends of the spectrum, every API finds a different stasis in terms of how complex and customizable they are. The SoftLayer API was designed to provide customers with granular control of every action associated with any product or service on our platform; anything you can do in our customer portal can be done via our API. That depth of functionality might be intimidating to developers looking to dive in quickly and incorporate the SoftLayer platform into their applications, so our development team has been working to streamline and simplify some of the most common API services to make them even more accessible.

To get an idea of what their efforts look like in practice, Phil posted an SLDN blog with a perfect example of how they simplified cloud computing instance (CCI) creation via the API. The traditional CCI ordering process required developers to define nineteen data points:

While each of those data points is straightforward, you still have to define nineteen of them. You have all of those options when you check out through our shopping cart, so it makes sense that you’d have them in the API, but when it comes to ordering through the API, you don’t necessarily need all of those options. Our development team observed our customers’ API usage patterns, and they created the slimmed-down and efficient SoftLayer_Virtual_Guest::createObject — a method that only requires seven data points:

Without showing you a single line of code, you see the improvement. Default values were established for options like Port speeds and Monitoring based on customer usage patterns, and as a result, developers only have to provide half the data to place a new CCI order. Because each data point might require multiple lines of code, the volume of API code required to place an order is slimmed down even more. The best part is that if you find yourself needing to modify one of the now-default options like Port speeds or Monitoring, you still can!

As the development team finds other API services and methods that can be streamlined and simplified like this one, they’ll ninja new solutions to make the API even more accessible. Have you tried coding to the SoftLayer API yet? If not, what’s the biggest roadblock for you? If you’re already a SLAPI coder, what other methods do you use often that could be streamlined?

-@khazard

This guest blog comes to us from Distil.it, a featured member of the SoftLayer Technology Partners Marketplace. Distil is the first content protection network that helps companies identify and block malicious content scraping and data theft. In this video we talk to Distil CEO Rami Essaid about how the company developed, their participation in the TechStars program and most importantly, how they can help you!

When Google’s “Panda” Algorithm Collides with Duplicate Content

If you’re a Webmaster, it’s likely you’ve heard about the Google latest search algorithm — “Panda” — and all the benefits and implications of this update. Today, we wanted highlight what happens when Google Panda collides online with duplicate content. There have been plenty of opinions written about Google Panda and duplicate content, but we want to provide some background and examples to help you better understand how Panda and duplicate content might affect you.

What is Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content is a term used in the field of search engine optimization to describe content that appears on more than one web page, within the same web site. When multiple pages within a web site contain essentially the same content, search engines such as Google can penalize/not display that site in any relevant search results.

Should you be Concerned?

When Google released Panda, there was a significant outcry from legitimate business and publishers who were either downgraded overnight in their search engine page rank or dropped all together. For many of the businesses, the Panda algorithm reduced SEO rank and decreased visitors, site revenue and online market awareness. Some websites even experienced damage to their brand, as their customers and prospects questioned whether they were still in business.

We’ve spoken with Cult of Mac, Digital Trends and several Fortune 1000 businesses, and they’ve all said the same thing: They were penalized and downgraded as a result of the Panda release as a result of unauthorized duplication of their content. They had done everything to comply with Google in optimizing their SEO configurations, but the third-party websites scraping and duplicating their content (outside of their control) caused their page ranks to fall.

Read the rest of Distil’s blog about content scrapers and Google’s Panda update »

This guest blog was submitted by Sumit Gupta, senior director of NVIDIA’s Tesla High Performance Computing business.

The demand for greater levels of computational performance remains insatiable in the high performance computing (HPC) and technical computing industries, as researchers, geophysicists, biochemists, and financial quants continue to seek out and solve the world’s most challenging computational problems.

However, access to high-powered HPC systems has been a constant problem. Researchers must compete for supercomputing time at popular open labs like Oak Ridge National Labs in Tennessee. And, small and medium-size businesses, even large companies, cannot afford to constantly build out larger computing infrastructures for their engineers.

Imagine the new discoveries that could happen if every researcher had access to an HPC system. Imagine how dramatically the quality and durability of products would improve if every engineer could simulate product designs 20, 50 or 100 more times.

This is where NVIDIA and SoftLayer come in. Together, we are bringing accessible and affordable HPC computing to a much broader universe of researchers, engineers and software developers from around the world.

GPUs: Accelerating Research

High-performance NVIDIA Tesla GPUs (graphics processing units) are quickly becoming the go-to solution for HPC users because of their ability to accelerate all types of commercial and scientific applications.

From the Beijing to Silicon Valley — and just about everywhere in between — GPUs are enabling breakthroughs and discoveries in biology, chemistry, genomics, geophysics, data analytics, finance, and many other fields. They are also driving computationally intensive applications, like data mining and numerical analysis, to much higher levels of performance — as much as 100x faster.

The GPU’s “secret sauce” is its unique ability to provide power-efficient HPC performance while working in conjunction with a system’s CPU. With this “hybrid architecture” approach, each processor is free to do what it does best: GPUs accelerate the parallel research application work, while CPUs process the sequential work.

The result is an often dramatic increase in application performance.

SoftLayer: Affordable, On-demand HPC for the Masses

Now, we’re coupling GPUs with easy, real-time access to computing resources that don’t break the bank. SoftLayer has created exactly that with a new GPU-accelerated hosted HPC solution. The service uses the same technology that powers some of the world’s fastest HPC systems, including dual-processor Intel E5-2600 (Sandy Bridge) based servers with one or two NVIDIA Tesla M2090 GPUs:

SoftLayer also offers an on-demand, consumption-based billing model that allows users to access HPC resources when and how they need to. And, because SoftLayer is managing the systems, users can keep their own IT costs in check.

You can get more system details and pricing information here: SoftLayer HPC Servers

I’m thrilled that we are able to bring the value of hybrid HPC computing to larger numbers of users. And, I can’t wait to see the amazing engineering and scientific advances they’ll achieve.

-Sumit Gupta, NVIDIA – Tesla

As a hobby, I dabble in WordPress, so I thought I’d share a few security features I use to secure my WordPress blogs as soon as they’re installed. Nothing in this blog will be earth-shattering, but because security is such a priority, I have no doubt that it will be useful to many of our customers. Often, the answer to the question, “How much security do I need on my site?” is simply, “More,” so even if you have a solid foundation of security, you might learn a new trick or two that you can incorporate into your next (or current) WordPress site.

Move wp-config.php

The first thing I do is change the location of my wp-config.php. By default, it’s installed in the WordPress parent directory. If the config file is in the parent directory, it can be viewed and accessed by Apache, so I move it out of web/root. Because you’re changing the default location of a pretty significant file, you need to tell WordPress how to find it in wp-load.php. Let’s say my WordPress runs out of /webroot on my host … I’d need to make a change around Line 26:

if ( file_exists( ABSPATH . 'wp-config.php') ) {
 
        /** The config file resides in ABSPATH */
        require_once( ABSPATH . 'wp-config.php' );
 
} elseif ( file_exists( dirname(ABSPATH) . '/wp-config.php' ) && ! file_exists( dirname(ABSPATH) . '/wp-settings.php' ) ) {
 
        /** The config file resides one level above ABSPATH but is not part of another install*/
        require_once( dirname(ABSPATH) . '/wp-config.php' );

The code above is the default setup, and the code below is the version with my subtle update incorporated.

if ( file_exists( ABSPATH . 'wp-config.php') ) {
 
        /** The config file resides in ABSPATH */
        require_once( ABSPATH . '../wp-config.php' );
 
} elseif ( file_exists( dirname(ABSPATH) . '..//wp-config.php' ) && ! file_exists( dirname(ABSPATH) . '/wp-settings.php' ) ) {
 
        /** The config file resides one level above ABSPATH but is not part of another install*/
        require_once( dirname(ABSPATH) . '../wp-config.php' );

All we’re doing is telling the application that the wp-config.php file is one directory higher. By making this simple change, you ensure that only the application can see your wp-config.php script.

Turn Down Access to /wp-admin

After I make that change, I want to turn down access to /wp-admin. I allow users to contribute on some of my blogs, but I don’t want them to do so from /wp-admin; only users with admin rights should be able to access that panel. To limit access to /wp-admin, I recommend the plugin uCan Post. This plugin creates a page that allows users to write posts and submit them within your theme.

But won’t a user just be able to navigate to http://site.com/wp-admin? Yes … Until we add a simple function to our theme’s functions.php file to limit that access. At the bottom of your functions.php file, add this:

############ Disable admin access for users ############

add_action('admin_init', 'no_more_dashboard');
function no_more_dashboard() {
  if (!current_user_can('manage_options') && $_SERVER['DOING_AJAX'] != '/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php') {
  wp_redirect(site_url()); exit;
  }
}
 
###########################################################

Log in as a non-admin user, and you’ll get redirected to the blog’s home page if you try to access the admin panel. Voila!

Start Securing the WordPress Database

Before you go any further, you need to look at WordPress database security. This is the most important piece in my opinion, and it’s not just because I’m a DBA. WordPress never needs all permissions. The only permissions WordPress needs to function are ALTER, CREATE, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES, DELETE, DROP, INDEX, INSERT, LOCK TABLES, SELECT and UPDATE.

If you run WordPress and MySQL on the same server the permissions grant would look something like:

GRANT ALTER, CREATE, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES, DELETE, DROP, INDEX, INSERT, LOCK TABLES, SELECT, UPDATE ON <DATABASE>.* TO <USER>@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '<PASSWORD>';

If you have a separate database server, make sure the host of the webserver is allowed to connect to the database server:

GRANT ALTER, CREATE, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES, DELETE, DROP, INDEX, INSERT, LOCK TABLES, SELECT, UPDATE ON <DATABASE>.* TO <USER>@'<ip of web server' IDENTIFIED BY '<PASSWORD>';

The password you use should be random, and you should not need to change this. DO NOT USE THE SAME PASSWORD AS YOUR ADMIN ACCOUNT.

By taking those quick steps, we’re able to go a long way to securing a default WordPress installation. There are other plugins out there that are great tools to enhance your blog’s security, and once you’ve got the fundamental security updates in place, you might want to check some of them out. Login LockDown is designed to stop brute force login attempts, and Secure WordPress has some great additional features.

What else do you do to secure your WordPress sites?

-Lee

Last week, I spent a few days at GDC in San Francisco, getting a glimpse into the latest games hitting the market. Game developers are a unique bunch, and that uniqueness goes beyond the unbelievable volume of NOS Energy Drinks they consume … They like to test and push the IT envelope, making games more diverse, interactive and social.

The new crop of games showcased at GDC is more resource-intensive — it’s almost like watching an IT arms race; they’re upping the ante for all online gaming companies. The appetite from the public remains relentless, and the pay-off can be huge. Consider that gaming industry research firm DFC Intelligence predicts that worldwide market revenue generated solely from online games is set to reach $26.4 billion in 2015, more than double the $11.9 achieved in 2009.

That’s where SoftLayer comes in. We understand the high stakes in the gaming world and have tailored our IaaS offerings for an optimal end-user experience that stretches from initial release to everyday play. Take a look at what game developer OMGPOP (a SoftLayer customer) achieved with Draw Something: Almost overnight it became the #1 application in Apple’s App Store, tallying more than 26 million downloads in just a few weeks. To put the volume of gameplay into perspective, the game itself is generating more than 30 hours of drawings per second. That’s what what we refer to as “Internet Scale.” When YouTube hit one hour of video uploads per second, they came up with a pretty impressive presentation to talk about that scale … and that’s only one hour per second.

Gamers require a high-performance, always on, graphically attractive and quick-responding experience. If they don’t get that experience, they move on to the next game that can give it to them. With our core strengths of automation and extensive network reach, game developers come to us to easily enable that experience, and in return, they get a platform where they can develop, test, deploy and yes, play their latest games. True “Internet Scale” with easy consumptive billing … Get in and out quickly, and use only what you need.

Some of the most interesting and innovative use cases of how customers take advantage of our platform come from the gaming industry. Because we make it easy to rapidly provision resources (deploy dedicated servers in less than two hours and cloud servers in as few as five minutes) in an automated way (our API), many developers have started incorporating cloud-like functions into their games and applications that add dedicated resources to their infrastructure on-demand as you’d only expect to see in a virtual environment. Now that Flex Images are available, we’re expecting to see a lot more of that.

As I was speaking with a few customers on the show floor, I was amazed to hear how passionate they were about what one called the “secret ingredient” at SoftLayer: Our network. He talked about his trials and tribulations in delivering global reach and performance before he transitioned his infrastructure to SoftLayer, and hearing what our high-bandwidth and low-latency architecture has meant for his games was an affirmation for all of the work we’ve put into creating (and continuing to build) the network.

The rapid pace of innovation and change that keeps the gaming industry going is almost electric … When you walk into a room filled with game developers, their energy is contagious. We ended GDC with an opportunity to do just that. We were proud to sponsor a launch party for our friends at East Side Game Studios as the celebrated the release of two new games — Zombinis and Ruby Skies. Since their NomNom Combo puzzle game is one of the most addicting games on my iPhone, it was a no-brainer to hook up with them at GDC. If you want a peek into the party, check out our GDC photo album on Facebook.

To give you an idea of how much the gaming culture permeates the SoftLayer offices, I need only point out a graffiti mural on one of the walls in our HQ office in Dallas. Because we sometimes get nostalgic for the days of misspent youth in video arcades playing Pac Man, Donkey Kong and Super Mario, we incorporated those iconic games in a piece of artwork in our office:

If you are an aspiring game developer, we’d like to hear from you and help enable the next Internet gaming sensation … Having a good amount of experience with our existing customer base should assure you that we know what we’re talking about. For now, though, it’s my turn to go “Draw Something.”

-@gkdog

This is a guest blog from Librato about Silverline. Silverline gives detailed information, presented in graphical form, on the actual usage of processor, memory and storage and network bandwidth at the application level. It also provides reliable estimates of application resource “demand,” which allows you to identify resource constraints as a potential source of performance issues and helps with capacity planning.

The Missing Link in Managing Cloud-Hosted Applications

Would you agree that one of the factors impacting the Quality of Service delivered by your applications is the availability of resources required for their execution? If you do, then you may wonder – as I do – why there aren’t more tools available to help you monitor and manage application resource consumption.

DevOps and operations teams use Cloud Resource Monitoring to keep track of the health and utilization of cloud resources, Real User Monitoring to ensure that their users experience the Quality of Service they expect, and Application Performance Management to find and fix performance issues in their applications.

What’s often missing is the ability to:

• Monitor and manage the use of resources at application level
• Ensure availability of resources
• Help in root cause analysis
• Improve resource utilization
• Do better capacity planning

Our Silverline Application Resource Management service fills this void by providing you detailed, application level data on the consumption of server resources (processor, memory, disk I/O and network I/O) and on the “demand” for these resources (i.e. how much of each resource an application would use if not restricted by resource availability). You can use this information to detect sudden changes and unusual patterns in resource consumption, identify situations in which applications are starved for resources, and to do capacity planning.

Silverline also allows you to guarantee availability of resources for individual applications or groups of applications, by setting resource quota. It guarantees that an application always receives resources up to its quota if it needs them but lets other applications use resources while it doesn’t need them. This makes it possible to run multiple applications on a server instance and guarantee that they will not interfere with each other, while at the same time improving the utilization of resources. It also allows you to make sure that critical applications (e.g. for collecting diagnostic data) are never starved for resources.

As a special case, you can use quota to let background workloads “harvest” spare resources: Simply set their resource quota to zero and they will only use resources not required by higher priority applications.

Silverline’s event handling feature allows you to set thresholds on resource consumption that can be used to send alarms or initiate automated actions. This allows you to receive early indications of problems like when an application’s resource consumption is exceeding normal levels or there is a significant gap between its resource use and resource demand. You can also take automated actions like killing rogue applications that consume too many resources.

If you’re looking for ways to improve the performance and availability of your SaaS or PaaS solution or to improve the utilization of your Softlayer cloud resources, give Silverline a try.

-Fred van den Bosch, Librato

This is a guest blog from Librato about Metrics. Metrics brings all of your monitoring data together in a unified hosted environment, enabling you to detect signs of problems early, minimize their impact through automated actions, and quickly find and fix their root cause.

Measure Everything!

If you’re a SaaS or PaaS provider, making sure that you deliver the Quality of Service that your users expect is probably your highest priority. This means that you rely on continuously monitoring all aspects of your operation that can alert you to unusual events and help you find and fix the root cause of any service degradations. User complaints cannot be the first sign of trouble, and there is no time to hunt for data that has not already been collected.

This need for information is the main reason why “Measure Everything” is the new principle by which SaaS and PaaS clouds are managed and why many DevOps and Operations teams are using a variety of open source and commercial tools to monitor their infrastructure. In addition they often need to monitor data that is collected with custom tools because it is specific to their application environment. Since each tool comes with its own user interface, alerting mechanism and set-up requirements, the monitoring work-flow is disjointed, wastes time, and – most importantly – introduces problems when trying to correlate data from different tools for rapid root cause analysis.

Wouldn’t it be nice if – just as there are standard Database Management platforms – there were Time Series Data Management platforms that provide uniform visualization, correlation and alerting, and a scalable, redundant repository for your metrics? Ideally, that platform would be delivered as a service and could even be embedded by SaaS and PaaS vendors to allow users to monitor their services directly.

Librato Metrics is the platform we built to meet that critical need. Designed from the ground up with an “API first” approach, Metrics allows customers and partners to easily send it any time series data and understand how that data fits with other data they are collecting.

If you want to provide your users with monitoring capabilities, you can integrate and embed Metrics at whatever level best fits your needs: data repository, instruments for your own dashboards, or complete “white label” dashboards. By programmatically creating user accounts and transparently signing your users onto the Metrics platform, you can deliver a seamless experience.

We used “flexible,” “affordable” and “simple” as our key mottos in developing a business model for Metrics. Our goal was to make the platform easy to adopt and completely transparent, empowering every organization to take advantage of the “measure everything” philosophy. We charge a modest amount (in “micro-dollars” actually) per measurement, provide a 30-day free trial, and charge you monthly for what you have used … there are no minimum fees or lock-ins.

To make it easy to adopt Metrics, we provide connectors for a variety of popular collection agents such as StatsD, CollectD, and JMX. To help build a broad collection of useful collectors and connectors to existing tools, we’re building a community and ecosystem where Metrics users and tool developers can contribute. We hope you’ll try out the platform and help us grow our community!

-Fred van den Bosch, Librato

I was on a Caribbean cruise during the second week of November, and I kept telling myself that the first thing I needed to taste was a delicious mango. Even though I knew it’s out of season, I still had hopes. I had a chance to indulge in that tropical fruit, and I couldn’t help but think about a mango that gets tastier with every day: the new Windows Phone OS 7.1, codenamed “Mango.”

I’m not going to talk about Mango or its new sensational features, but I do want to share a few of the changes that we pushed out to the Windows Phone Marketplace as a version 1.1 of SoftLayer Mobile. While I could ramble for pages about all of the updates and our strategy in building out and improving the mobile platform, but I’ll try to be brief and only share four of the biggest new features the team included in this release.

Verisign Authentication
The first update you’ll notice when you fire up SoftLayer Mobile 1.1 on Windows Phone is the security-rich inclusion of VeriSign authentication. You are able to activate an additional layer of security by requiring that users confirm their identity with a trusted third party tool before they get access to your account. In this case, the third party vendor is VeriSign. Every customer looking to bake in additional security on their account will appreciate this addition.

Device-Based Bandwidth
The next big addition to this Windows Phone app release is the inclusion of device-based bandwidth for two billing cycles – your current cycle and the previous cycle. In v. 1.0 of SoftLayer Mobile, users were only able to see bandwidth data for the current billing cycle … It’s useful, but you don’t have a frame of reference immediately available. This release provides that frame of reference. One of the coolest parts is the aesthetically pleasing presentation: our metro-style container, “pivot control.” Just slide through and see your billing cycles in one long view!

Bandwidth Graphs
If you didn’t notice from the picture, its caption or the heading of this section, the next big update is the inclusion of bandwidth graphs! The bandwidth graph page gives you a bird’s eye view of your bandwidth activity for any selected billing cycle. You’ll see the max “Inbound,” “Outbound” and “Total” values. Those different marks are very useful if you’re tracking which days your device uses the most bandwidth and when those surges subside. The application uses the built-in charting functionality that comes with Silverlight libraries. Since we’re taking advantage of those goodies, you can bet it looks beautiful. No, it’s not a bitmap image … it’s a real bandwidth chart. As with the other bandwidth update, the graphs are available for both the current and the previous billing cycle.

Ticket Updates
The next addition to the family is a new way to visually distinguish your unread updates on tickets while viewing a ticket list page. The “toast” notification for the ticket list view gives flags unread ticket updates, and the ticket list will feature bold text on the ticket’s subject if that ticket is marked with an “unread update” *ndash; meaning an employee or someone has an update to that ticket which you haven’t seen yet. This is very much Outlook-y style and very native to Windows Phone.

What’s Next?
With this release, we’re not resting on our laurels, so what are we doing in our labs? Right now we’re working on OS migration to move our existing app from OS 7.0 to the new Mango-flavored Windows Phone 7 version I mentioned a little earlier. Now you see why I was so fixated on mangoes while I was on vacation. The migrated mango app will only be available to devices that are mango-licious (Upgraded to 7.1).

Stay tuned, and you’ll see some of the other new features we’re working on very soon. If you have a Windows Phone, you need to download SoftLayer Mobile, rate it and give us your feedback!

-Imran

Shortly after we began implementing the SoftLayer Mobile application for the iPhone and Android, Apple released the iPad. With our development resources limited, we focused on adding the functionality our customers required to the iPhone application with only a few small features added to support the new device.

As we became more familiar with the iPad, we started seeing a few key areas where SoftLayer Mobile could benefit from the large format iPad user interface. We’ve been able to incorporate a phenomenal feature set in the SoftLayer Mobile application, and as our desired feature set has become more and more complete, we’ve gotten a bit of breathing room from our iPhone releases. We used that breathing room to re-visit the iPad and what it could mean for the SoftLayer Mobile customer experience on a tablet. The result of that investigation is the SoftLayer Mobile HD application:

As you might expect, SoftLayer Mobile HD shares quite a bit of functionality with its iPhone sibling. The application offers a window into your SoftLayer environment so that you can browse, create and edit support tickets; discover information about computing resources and bandwidth; and keep up-to-date on the latest notifications from our data centers. The iPad application also helps you keep track of financial information by allowing you to browse your account and its invoices. All this functionality benefits from the intuitive interface of the iPad. You have more room to browse, more room to edit, and fewer screens to navigate as you manage and explore your virtual SoftLayer data center.

Best of all: The application is only in its first release, and already shows great promise! We have plenty of room to grow and tons of ideas about the next features and functions we want to add. If you’re iPad-equipped, get the SoftLayer Mobile HD application in the iTunes App Store. When you’re navigating through the interface, take note of anything you’d like to see us change or add, and let us know!

-Scott

This is a guest blog from the MODX team. MODX offers an intuitive, feature-rich, open source content management platform that can easily integrate with other applications as the heart of your Customer Experience Management solution.

Free your Website with MODX CMS

Just having a website or a blog is no longer a viable online strategy for smart businesses. Today’s interconnected world requires engaging customers — from the first impression, to developing leads, educating, selling, empowering customer service and beyond. This key shift in online interaction is known as Customer Experience Management, or CXM.

For businesses to have success with CXM, they need an efficient way to connect all facets of their communications and information together with a modern and consistent look and feel, and without long learning curves or frustrating user experiences. You don’t want a Content Management System (CMS) that restricts your ability to meet brand standards, that lives in isolation from your other systems and data, or that fails to fulfil your businesses needs.

MODX is a content management platform that gives you the creative freedom to build custom websites limited only by your imagination. It certainly can play the central role in managing your customer experience.

Read the rest of MODX’s Guest Blog! »