Posts Tagged ‘service’

When people ask me what I do for a living these days, I tell them I provide emergency response services. With this answer, I usually get very surprised and intrigued looks as they probe for more details about the excitement of saving lives. For those that have known me for a while, they are especially shocked since my career until recently has always entailed sitting in a cubicle, crunching numbers and manipulating spreadsheets.

I don’t actually provide ERS, and I don’t “technically” save lives during my work days, but I do provide emergency services for our customers, and if you ask them, they’ll probably tell you I’m a little like a life saver. I tell people I’m an emergency responder as a bit of a joke, but it’s actually a great way to start explaining what I do at SoftLayer. When a customer’s service is disrupted (preventing them from conducting important business), we need to respond immediately and knowledgeably to get everything back online as quickly as possible.

As Server Build Technicians, we have to be alert and ready for situations where a server goes down and affects the availability of a customer’s site. Being offline can often translate to the loss of revenue and this I completely understand: If I wanted to buy something on a site and I find that the site is offline, I’ll probably fire up a search page and look for another vendor. The first store loses my sale because I’m so conditioned to everything being available right when I need it … And I’m not alone in this mentality.

When I started writing this article, we were gearing up for natural disaster to hit the Washington, D.C. area over the weekend (for the first time in my career). We had to plan what needed to be done at home and work … Because SoftLayer provides web hosting services that must be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, so we have to do our best to minimize any service impact. We were lucky to have avoided much of the damage from Hurricane Irene, but we still treated it as though it was heading right toward us. In addition to the employees on site, everyone was on call to be ready to come in and help if needed. For those who have never experienced a hurricane, just think of a severe thunderstorm that lasts 8 to 12 hours, resulting in widespread power outages, flooding and wind damage.

A hurricane is scary for everyone in its path, and to a certain extent, all you can do is be safe and have a plan of response. Our data center has extremely reliable power generators and staff to handle these kinds of situations; we’re always prepared for the worst case scenarios for your servers so you don’t have to be.

-Danny

P.S. If you’ve never thought about becoming a “Server Emergency Responder,” I’d recommend swinging by the SoftLayer Careers page to learn more about becoming a Server Build Technician. As of right now, there are SBT positions available in Dallas, Seattle, Amsterdam, Singapore and Washington, D.C.

The Northeastern part of the United States saw two natural disasters within the span of five days of each other. The first was in the Washington, D.C. area: A 5.8 earthquake on August 23, 2011. On August 28, Hurricane Irene made her way up the east coast, leaving nearly 5.5 million people without power. We do everything we can to prepare our facilities for natural disasters (generator power backup, staffing, redundant bandwidth links and providers, etc.), and given the recent events, now might be a good time to start thinking about how your servers respond when something out of the ordinary happens … Let’s look at two relatively easy ways you can set your business up to scale and recover.

The first option you may consider would be to set up a multi-tiered environment by deploying multiple servers in various geographical locations. Your servers in each location could be accessed via load balancing or round robin DNS. In this kind of high-availability environment, your servers could handle the incoming requests more quickly with the load being split amongst the multiple data centers. The failover would be just a few seconds should you lose connectivity to one of the locations.

The second option to consider would be the private image repository for our CloudLayer Computing. This options allows you to save a private image template in different data centers, each ready for quick deployment without having to install and configure the same operating system and applications. Should you need additional resources or lose connectivity to your instance in one facility, you can deploy the saved image in another facility. The failover time would be only in the provisioning process of the Computer Instance … which doesn’t take too long.

Scalability makes sense no matter what situation you may be facing – from natural disaster to hitting the front page of Reddit. If you have any questions about these scalability options, “Click to Chat” on our site or give us a call and a sales rep can help you get prepared. Your infrastructure may have come through these recent events unscathed, but don’t let that lull you into a false sense of security. The “It’s better to be safe than sorry” cliche is a cliche for a reason: It’s worth saying often.

-Greg

Once in a blue moon, a SoftLayer customer has to cancel a server. Sometimes their business is growing and they’re moving up to more powerful hardware, sometimes they need to consolidate their equipment to cut their costs, and sometimes their reason can’t really be categorized. In this case, a happy customer with a few dozen servers decided he needed to shut one down, and the explanation he gave would clearly fall into the third category:

Initial Ticket

Customer

I would like to cancel this server on August 20th, 2011, but not before that date. Anytime on this date will be okay.

We no longer have a need for this server and would like to cancel it before our next billing period. Thank you for your help in this matter. Please send me an email when this server has been canceled on August 20th, 2011.

She’s been with us for a long time, but things just aren’t working out … She’s become a gold digger. It’s her, not me. Please let her down easy. I don’t like punking out and having someone do my dirty work, but I’m afraid she might be violent. Diamond rings hurt when you get hit with them.

SoftLayer

I’m sorry to hear things did not work out for the two of you. While your safety is important to us, I must ask that you end this relationship via official channels.

Please submit an official cancellation request by going to Sales –> Cancel Server and proceeding through the cancellation steps. The server will be reclaimed at the end of your billing cycle on August 22nd.

Please let us know if you have any questions.

Customer

She always tried to make it hard for me to break up with her. Done!
 

SoftLayer

Glad to hear things went smoothly. Things don’t always do, but we knew you could pull through it.
 

Official Cancellation Request

Let this be a lesson to all of you: Get out your seat and jump around.

-@khazard

This is a guest blog from Tim Falls of SendGrid, a technology partner that provides cloud-based email infrastructure for reliable delivery, scalability, real-time analytics and flexible APIs for customers who want to focus on driving their own growth and profitability.

Understanding the Value of [Email] Infrastructure Services

The Fall of DIY … As We Know It
Today more than ever before, businesses depend on third party services to operate efficiently and achieve their objectives. As a business leader, you have countless web applications and software as service solutions at your fingertips, which collectively address just about any problem or demand imaginable. Examples include cloud-based file storage, cloud and dedicated web hosting, recurring billing applications, online HR management portals, APIs for telephony and geo-data, and managed email infrastructure and delivery services. Startups and established corporations alike can utilize these tools quickly and simply with a credit card and a few clicks on a trackpad.

So, what does this mean, and why is it worth recognizing and appreciating? Well, it means that your life is a lot easier than it was 10 years ago. And if you fail to recognize the opportunities and advantages that these resources offer, your competitors will soon leave you in their proverbial dust … if they haven’t already.

The gist:

• You don’t have to do everything yourself anymore … So don’t!
• Be the best at what you do, and rely on other experts to help with everything outside of your realm.

The Email Puzzle
Let’s face it. Email sucks. Not email in and of itself – obviously, it is an essential part of our lives and is arguably one of the most transformative communication tools in human history. But, from a business standpoint, the implementation and maintenance of an effective and efficient email system is truly a nightmare. If there is one thing that web developers across the world can agree upon, it may be this: Successfully integrating email into a web application just ain’t fun!

Read the rest of SendGrid’s Guest Blog! »

SoftLayer is in a constant state of change … It’s not that bad change we all fear; it’s the type of change that allows you to stretch the boundaries of your normal experience and run like a penguin … Because I got some strange looks when coworkers read “run like a penguin,” I should explain that I recently visited Moody Gardens in Galveston and saw penguins get crazy excited when they were about to get fed, so that’s the best visual I could come up with. Since I enjoy a challenge (and enjoy running around like a penguin), when I was asked to design the new version of SLDN, I was excited.

The goal was simple: Take our already amazing documentation software infrastructure and make it better. A large part of this was to collapse our multi-site approach down into a single unified user experience. Somewhere along the way, “When is the proposal going to be ready?” became “When is the site going to be ready?”, at this point I realized that all of the hurdles I had been trampling over in my cerebral site building were now still there, standing, waiting for me on my second lap.

I recently had the honor to present our ideas, philosophy and share some insight into the technical details of the site at OSCON 2011, and KHazzy had the forethought to record it for all of you!

It’s a difficult balance to provide details and not bore the audience with tech specs, so I tried to keep the presentation relatively light to encourage attendees (and now viewers) to ask questions about areas they want a little more information about. If you’re looking at a similar project in the future, feel free to bounce ideas off me, and I’ll steer you clear of a few land mines I happened upon.

-Phil

This is a guest blog from Chris Lantrip, CEO of CyberlinkASP, an application service provider focused on hosting, upgrading and managing the industry’s best software.

The DesktopLayer from CyberlinkASP

Hosted virtual desktops – SoftLayer style.

In early 2006, we were introduced to SoftLayer. In 2007, they brought us StorageLayer, and in 2009, CloudLayer. Each of those solutions met a different kind of need in the Application Service Provider (ASP) world, and by integrating those platforms into our offering, DesktopLayer was born: The on-demand anytime, anywhere virtual desktop hosted on SoftLayer and powered by CyberlinkASP.

CyberlinkASP was originally established to instantly web-enable software applications that were not online in the past. Starting off as a Citrix integration firm in the early days, we were approached by multiple independent software vendors asking us to host, manage and deliver their applications from a centralized database platform to their users across multiple geographic locations. With the robust capabilities of Citrix, we were able to revolutionize application delivery and management for several ISV’s.

Over time, more ISV’s starting showing up at our doorstep, and application delivery was becoming a bigger and bigger piece of our business. Our ability to provision users on a specific platform in minutes, delete them in minutes, perform updates and maintain hundreds of customers and thousands of users all at one time from a centralized platform was very attractive.

Read the rest of CyberlinkASP’s Guest Blog! »

This is a guest blog from Troy Davis of Papertrail, a SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partner that helps customers detect, resolve and avoid infrastructure problems using log messages.

Receive DB Slow Query Logs in Your Inbox

Want to wake up to important database and syslog messages with your bagel and coffee? Here’s how. It’s free and takes about 5 minutes.

Most of us run a database somewhere on our SoftLayer servers. Whether it’s MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, or another relational or NoSQL sibling, a responsive data store is critical to happy users. That’s why databases send slow queries to a log file. It’s much better than no logging at all, but as an engineer, I’d wanted more. I wanted to:

• View all my query logs in one place, without SSHing to each server for tail and grep. My workload shouldn’t scale linearly as I add systems
• Share log visibility with employees who don’t have server access or command-line knowledge (and email links to specific log messages to my developers and DBAs)
• Receive log messages in my inbox – or send them to my team or monitoring service – when I know they need attention
• Examine logs for related HTTP requests, daemon output, API invocations, and other parts of our stack — I can troubleshoot faster with start-to-finish logs on a single screen.

That’s where Papertrail was born. We built Papertrail to make log aggregation and log management effortless and usable. It’s the hosted log management service that we wanted as developers, systems engineers and tech entrepreneurs.

We know the hesitation you might have when approaching this kind of service, so our goal was to enable users to have Papertrail deliver those SQL slow query logs – or any other logs – to your inbox every morning for free:

Read the rest of Papertrail’s Guest Blog! »

This is a guest blog from Jason Abate of Panopta, a SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partner specializing in monitoring your servers and managing outages with tools and resources designed to help minimize the impact of outages to your online business.

5 Server Monitoring Best Practices

Prior to starting Panopta, I was responsible for the technology and operations side of a major international hosting company and worked with a number of large online businesses. During this time, I saw my share of major disasters and near catastrophes and had a chance to study what works and what doesn’t when Murphy’s Law inevitably hits.

Monitoring is a key component of any serious online infrastructure, and there are a wide range of options when it comes to monitoring tools — from commercial and open-source software that you install and manage locally to monitoring services like Panopta. The best solution depends on a number of criteria, but there are five major factors to consider when making this decision.

Read the rest of Panopta’s Guest Blog! »

Giving a customer the ability to do something that they didn’t know they could (or even know was possible) can make for an exceptional customer experience.

I’ve had a season mini-pack of Dallas Mavericks tickets for a handful of years now and have always gotten the exact experience that I expected: The same seats every time, consistent food and drink, great entertainment, and a quality team on the court that wins considerably more often than not.

However, this year it’s been a little different. This year, they have thrown in several perks that cost them nothing or next to nothing but have made a huge difference in the overall experience.

One game in particular sticks out in my mind. A couple of weeks before a game against the Wizards, I got an email about a no-cost chance for me and one other person to stand in a high five line to give fives to the players as they came out for warmups. I had no idea fans actually got to do this, so I gladly signed up and took my 5 year-old son to the game. I had also received an invite from the sales rep to choose a date to spend the first half of a game in one of the suites, so I made it the same night.

That night, we joined a small group of people down by the tunnel before the game, and we got to give all the players, Mark Cuban, the Mavs Maniacs and even a few security guards high fives. My son was over-the-moon to “meet” his favorite players – Dirk, Kidd, and Jet – could hardly contain himself.

This game also happened to be the week before the Super Bowl. I only mention it because on the way to our suite, I was blinded by the biggest ring I had ever seen. It turned out to be a Super Bowl ring and the guy wearing it was James Harrison (the linebacker for Steelers that lost a bunch of money to fines for helmet to helmet hits last season), so I got to meet him and wish him luck for the big game.

Oh, and and I can’t forget to mention the free hats, shirts, and Roddy B. bobblehead.

Long story short, I probably couldn’t tell you who won the other ten games I went to this year, but I don’t think I’ll forget anything about this particular game.

The thing I took away from this experience is when you give a customer something above and beyond what is expected, however seemingly insignificant, you can monumentally improve their customer experience.

To bring it back around to SoftLayer, we give customers a great API – a REST API at that. We give them VPN, a private network, IPv6, and a fully provisioned server in a couple of hours. Each of these differentiators enables us to provide products and services that our competitors can only hope to imitate.

The first time the customer uses the API to automatically create a new Cloud Instance from their own program, it’ll be a Maverick-game experience. When they transfer data from Washington, D.C., to San Jose, CA, on our private network with zero bandwidth charge, they’ll feel like they’re high-fiving Dirk Nowitski. When they access their server over the free KVM over IP, they’re walking up to the suite and meeting a Super Bowl champion. And all of that is on top of a stable, speedy server environment!

What can we do to improve your customer experience?

-Brad

Learning SoftLayer’s API
When I first started to look at SoftLayer’s API, I favored the SOAP programming interface because I liked the strictly formatted XML responses, the good separation of concerns (using the server as proxy for data retrieval) and the increased security. All of these are great reasons to use the SOAP interface, but once I saw how easy and direct the REST interface is, I decided that I would use it as my cornerstone for learning the SoftLayer API.

REST API
Although the REST software archetype is a difficult concept to explain, its practice has become natural to those of us who use the internet daily. Imagine that the information that you want to know is saved as a web page somewhere and all you have to do is type in the URL, it will prompt you for a username and password, and you will see the information that you requested.

Authentication
Before making a request you will need to find your API authentication token. To do this, log into your customer account and click API under the Support tab. Click the “Manage API Access” link. At the bottom of the next page you will see a drop-down menu that says “Select a User” and above it a tag that says “Generate a new API access key.” Select a user and click the “Generate API Key” button. You will see your username and the generated API key for that user. Copy this API key, as you’ll need it to send commands SoftLayer’s API.

“Hello World”
Unfortunately, there is no specific “Hello World” command in SoftLayer’s API, but there are some commands that are very simple and don’t require any variables, like the getObject() method. APIs are like component libraries, split into web services and methods of that service. The SLDN has a full list of SoftLayer’s web services to choose from. I am going to use the getObject() method from the SoftLayer_Account service in this example:

https://api.softlayer.com/rest/v3/SoftLayer_Account.xml

• You will be prompted for your username and API access key
• XML data type output

https://USERNAME:PASSWORD@api.softlayer.com/rest/v3/SoftLayer_Account.json

• Automatic authentication
• JSON data type output

The Request
Here is the basic REST request structure:

https://username:API key@api.service.softlayer.com/rest/v3/serviceName/InitializationParameter.returnDatatype

• All requests are sent via secure transfer (https://)
• Listing your username and API key before the URL allows for automatic HTTP authentication
• Service and serviceName both refer to the web service you are trying to access
• InitializationParameter is only used if the method you are calling requires an initialization Parameter
• SoftLayer’s REST API can respond with either JSON or XML data types; replace returnDatatype with the type you would like to receive.

The Data
Looking at the first link above, your browser should be able to output the response data in XML format, showing information about your account. More information about the format of the data can be found on the SLDN wiki.

REST Basics
When you start integrating this into a website you will want to get/make a function or library to handle advanced requests and to properly receive and disperse the response; I recommend using JQuery. This is the most basic example of a function call for SoftLayer’s API, I hope that it will help you get a feel for the information that you will need to pass to our server and the kind of response that you will receive.

-Kevin