If that work environment seems like torture, you probably haven’t been on the front lines of a development team. I was a member of a band of brothers at war with poorly documented vendor APIs, trying to emerge victorious from the Battle of Version 1.0. We operated (and suffered) like a startup in its early stages, so I’ve had firsthand experience with the ups and downs of creating and innovating in technology. Little did I know that those long hours and challenges were actually preparing me to help hundreds of other developers facing similar circumstances … I was training to be a Catalyst SLayer:

You probably know a lot about Catalyst by now, but one of the perks of the program that often gets overshadowed by “free hosting” is the mentorship and feedback the SoftLayer team provides every Catalyst participant. Entrepreneurs bounce ideas off of guys like Paul Ford and George Karidis to benefit from the years of experience and success we’ve experienced, and the more technical folks can enlist our help in figuring out more efficient ways to tie their platforms to their infrastructure.

When I was forging through the startup waters, I was fortunate to have been supported by financially reinforced walls and the skilled engineers of a well-established hosting company in Tokyo. Unfortunately, that kind of support is relatively uncommon. That’s where Catalyst swoops in. SoftLayer’s roots were planted in the founders’ living rooms and garages, so we’re particularly fond of other companies who are bootstrapping, learning from failure and doing whatever it takes to succeed. In my role with Catalyst, I’ve effectively become a resource for hundreds of startups around the world … and that feels good.

Five days before my official start date, I receive a call from Josh telling me that we’d be spending my first official week on the job in Seattle with Surf Incubator and Portland with Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE). While the trip did not involve carving waves or stuffing our faces with baked goods (bummer), we did get to hear passionate people explain what keeps them up at night. We got to share a little bit about SoftLayer and how we can help them sleep better (or fuel them with more energy when they’re up at night … depending on which they preferred), and as I headed back to Los Angeles, I knew I made the right choice to become a SLayer. I’m surrounded by energy, creativity, passion, innovation and collaboration on a daily basis. It’s intoxicating.

TL;DR: I love my job.

-@andy_mui

Meet SoftLayer Message Queue.

As the name would suggest, Message Queue allows you to create one or more “queues” or containers which contain “messages” — strings of text that you can assign attributes to. The queues pass along messages in first-in-first-out order, and in doing so, they allow for parallel processing of high-volume workflows.

That all sounds pretty complex and “out there,” but you might be surprised to learn that you’re probably using a form of message queuing right now. Message queuing allows for discrete threads or applications to share information with one another without needing to be directly integrated or even operating concurrently. That functionality is at the heart of many of the most common operating systems and applications on the market.

What does it mean in a cloud computing context? Well, Message Queue facilitates more efficient interaction between different pieces of your application or independent software systems. The easiest way demonstrate how that happens is by sharing a quick example:

Creating a Video-Sharing Site

Let’s say we have a mobile application providing the ability to upload video content to your website: sharevideoswith.phil. The problem we have is that our webserver and CMS can only share videos in a specific format from a specific location on a CDN. Transcoding the videos on the mobile device before it uploads proves to be far too taxing, what with all of the games left to complete from the last Humble Bundle release. Having the videos transcoded on our webserver would require a lot of time/funds/patience/knowledge, and we don’t want to add infrastructure to our deployment for transcoding app servers, so we’re faced with a conundrum. A conundrum that’s pretty easily answered with Message Queue and SoftLayer’s (free) video transcoding service.

What We Need

• Our Video Site
• The SoftLayer API Transcoding Service
• SoftLayer Object Storage
• A “New Videos” Container
• A “Transcoded Videos” Container with CDN Enabled
• SoftLayer Message Queue
• “New Videos” Queue
• “Transcoding Jobs” Queue

The Process

1. Your user uploads the video to sharevideoswith.phil. Your web app creates a page for the video and populates the content with a “processing” message.
2. The web application saves the video file into the “New Vidoes” container on object storage.
3. When the video is saved into that container, it creates a new message in the “New Videos” message queue with the video file name as the body.
4. From here, we have two worker functions. These workers work independently of each other and can be run at any comfortable interval via cron or any scheduling agent:

Each step in the process is handled by an independent component. This allows us to scale or substitute each piece as necessary without needing to refactor the other portions. As long as each piece receives and sends the expected message, its colleague components will keep doing their jobs.

Video transcoding is a simple use-case that shows some of the capabilities of Message Queue. If you check out the Message Queue page on our website, you can see a few other examples — from online banking to real-time stock, score and weather services.

Message Queue leverages Cloudant as the highly scalable low latency data layer for storing and distributing messages, and SoftLayer customers get their first 100,000 messages free every month (with additional messages priced at $0.01 for every 10,000).

What are you waiting for? Go get started with Message Queue!

-Phil (@SoftLayerDevs)

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

Understanding the User Experience with In-Page Analytics

Since ClickTale’s start back in 2006, we understood that engaging visitors on a website is the first step to increase conversions. Although traditional web analytics are great for delivering general statistics such as number of visitors or pages per visit, they leave a big black hole when it comes to understanding what happens inside the pages themselves.

ClickTale’s In-Page Analytics feature set enables you to identify, observe, aggregate and analyze visitors’ actual interaction inside your site, so you know exactly what page elements work, what to optimize and how to increase visitor engagement.

Our wide range of web optimization tools include Mouse Tracking, Heatmap Suite and Conversion Analytics solutions, but was our Visitor Recordings feature that started it all. Giving you a front row seat to your visitors’ browsing sessions and delivering a thorough, in-depth view into what your visitors are focusing on and interacting with inside the pages themselves. All you need to do is grab the popcorn.

Our Heat maps are aggregated reports that visually display what parts of a webpage are looked at, clicked on, focused on and interacted with by your online visitors. See exactly what images, text and call to action buttons your visitors’ think are hot and what’s not!

Both these features allow you to instantly see how to go about optimizing your website instantly so you don’t have to guess.

As a fully hosted subscription service, ClickTale is quick and easy to set up. We believe our wide range of heatmaps, behavioral analytics and full video playback make ClickTale the perfect way to round out your traditional web analytics suite. For more information, please visit www.clicktale.com.

- Shmuli Goldberg, ClickTale

Enter KVM over IP. (Also known as Keyboard-Video-Mouse)

Yes boys and girls, this wonderful feature provided on all mid to high-performance multi-core servers can be your best friend in a time of need. While on a routine support call, a customer of mine stated the server was blocking not only himself but a lot of his customers. I kept a level head and told him it was no problem. He paused for a moment then let me know just how big a deal it was, while he was explaining I promptly used the KVM to login to his server and shutdown the firewall. All of a sudden he stopped talking and said “It’s working!”, “What did you do?” I explained to him how KVM works just as if you were hooking up a console to your server, and can be used even if your public Ethernet cable is unplugged. I went on to show him where it was in his home portal and how all of this was given to him for free. Also I explained the issue had been fixed from my desk without ever having access to either the public or private ports on his server. The customer had never heard of such a feature and was amazed at how easy it was to use.

The beauty of KVM over IP is it removes the one thing many server owners dread, not being able to be in the data center when issues arise with their standard connection methods (RDP, SSH). With KVM over IP we are giving the customer a solution to that problem. Via KVM you can login to the management interface card, which in most cases resides on an entirely different network, and within seconds you will have access to your terminal as if you were standing right there in the datacenter!!! Not only can you connect to your server, you can manually power it on/off and also reboot your server all within the same management screen. Beyond server access you can monitor temperature readings as well as fan speeds in the server. The KVM card is a HUGE tool in any Softlayer customers’ toolbox and one that we in the Operations Team use often.

Here at Softlayer we are always thinking about how to make your business easier to run, whether it be implementing global services such as CDN, or making sure our customers have basic access to their server in the event of a crisis. Since starting my career here at Softlayer and learning of the KVM feature I’ve made it a point to inform the customer of the KVM interface along with all features that are offered to them (and believe me they never stop coming!) so be sure and check our announcements page because you never know what we will come out with next!

-Romeo