Today we're happy to announce beta support for node.js, and you can now run your node.js applications on AppHarbor. In this blogpost we'll walk you through the things you should be aware of when deploying node.js apps to AppHarbor and some background on why we're adding support for it.

As you probably know by now we're committed to giving the .NET world the fastest and most convenient way to deploy, manage and scale applications on Windows-based servers in the cloud. As such we didn't immediately think of node.js as the most obvious second platform to support. With recent developments in the node.js community, in particular Microsoft's support of a native Windows implementation along with the performance and stability it brings, node.js on Windows has become viable.

A number of fiery talks by Glenn Block on why node.js has a place in the Windows world further pushed us to make this decision. Finally Tomasz Janczuk made it incredibly easy for us to support it with the iisnode project, which allows us to run node.js inside IIS.

Without further ado let's dive into preparing and deploying a node.js application on AppHarbor. As this is a node.js blogpost we'll of course deploy a chat application and will use Ryan Dahl's node chat demo application. Applications that use iisnode needs a web.config in order to configure the application in IIS. When developing the application you can easily test it by installing iisnode and it's dependencies on your local system which are listed on the Github page. Make sure to take a look at the samples included to get a better understanding of how you can use the web.config file to configure your application.

Start by cloning the application from GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/ry/node_chat.git

The node chat uses the server.js file as the starting point, so we'll make sure to register that in our new web.config

<configuration>
    <system.webServer>
        <handlers>
            <add name="iisnode" path="server.js" verb="*" modules="iisnode" />
        </handlers>
        <iisnode loggingEnabled="false" />

        <rewrite>
            <rules>
                <rule name="myapp">
                    <match url="/*" />
                    <action type="Rewrite" url="server.js" />
                </rule>
            </rules>
        </rewrite>
    </system.webServer>
</configuration>

Most of this is taken from the express sample web.config which show the iisnode module is configured to handle the server.js file and alse how URL rewrites are configured so we don't have to use the filenames directly. Two things are worth noting:

• Disable logging: The iisnode elements sets loggingEnabled="true" which is necessary to run your node.js application on AppHarbor. The iisnode module writes a log file to the directory where the application runs and writing to the filesystem is not supported by default on AppHarbor. Alternatively, you can enable instance file system writes in the application settings on AppHarbor.
• Environment variables: iisnode automatically configures the node.js application with environment variables read from appSettings. In the example above the `NODE_ENV` variable is set. This sets the current node environment and you could should add a configuration variable on AppHarbor with the value "production". That value will then be replaced when you deploy the application as [described here](http://support.appharbor.com/kb/getting-started/managing-environments). If you've provisioned [add-ons](https://appharbor.com/addons) to your application their configuration variables will also be automatically injected.

With this configuration we're good to go and the application can be deployed to AppHarbor:

git remote add appharbor https://appharbor.com/<foo>.git
git push appharbor master

That's it - AppHarbor will the detect the node.js application and deploy it to the the application server. Go to the application's URL (this example is deployed here if you want to take a look) and start chatting with all your friends.

A couple of final remarks:

• NPM: If you're using NPM you'll have to make sure that all dependencies are included in the repository. We may support automatic download of dependencies with NPM in the future, but are waiting until a stable Windows version is ready.
• Websockets are not currently supported
• Node.js support on AppHarbor should only be used for development and beta testing purposes. We wanted to give our users the opportunity to try node.js soon and iron out any kinks with us, but for now this feature should be considered early beta. Please don't put your "mission critical" node.js apps on AppHarbor just yet.

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past month, you've probably heard of the SOPA and PIPA laws that are making their way through the US Congress. If passed, the laws will require US companies to censor the Internet in an effort to prevent copyright infringement.

We built AppHarbor because we love the Internet. AppHarbor makes it easy for people like you to make the Internet even better by taking the pain out of deploying and scaling web-applications. We feel strongly that the SOPA and PIPA laws, if passed in their current form, pose a grave threat to the free and open Internet that we know and love. For that reason, we support the January 18th protests alongside Google, Wikipedia and many others.

If you want to participate in the protest by blacking out your AppHarbor-hosted application, we have created a Stop-SOPA utility that makes the process very simple. Go to https://stopsopa.apphb.com/ to get the details. The utility will cause a blackout-page build to be deployed for your application in the same way that MaintMan deploys a maintenance mode page. Once you're done protesting, you can push a new build to AppHarbor or go to the application dashboard to deploy a previous build.

The Stop-SOPA utitlity uses some clever new bits of AppHarbor API. We will publish the source code in another blog post in a day or two.

Note that appbarbor.com will be available in its usual form throughout Wednesday 18th, but we support and encourage blackout protests by our users.

The first featured app of 2012 is WorkFu. WorkFu is headquartered in London, but the founding team is spread all over the UK. We talked to Neil Kinnish about the project.

What is WorkFu?

WorkFu is a web application that uses your social networks to find work opportunities that are relevant to you.

You can read more about the project and how it works and follow our progress on Twitter

Why did you choose AppHarbor?

We chose AppHarbor because we needed a reliable, scalable cloud based hosting service. AppHarbor gives us freedom to pick and choose the correct tools for our requirements and budget without locking us down to technologies and without high upfront costs. We also like the fact that we can provision Amazon services in the same location that our application is running.

Which technologies is WorkFu built on?

WorkFu is built on MVC 3 and utilises: Redis, Memcached, Autofac, Lucene, Dapper.net, SignalR, jQuery, Booksleeve, Elmah, MS SQL Server 2008, S3 for file storage and Postmark for mail delivery

We have background services running on separate Amazon instances along with our Redis and Memcached implementations.

How has AppHarbor worked for you so far?

AppHarbor is Superb. There are obvious benefits, such as being able to scale on demand. And it’s a joy managing the work flow through Git, especially as we all work remotely.

I should also mention that the support so far has been excellent.

How often do you deploy new versions?

Continuously. The project is in a constant state of development and progress.

What did you like best? Where could we improve?

One of the most important elements to any service is the support and this should not be under estimated. I’m happy that along with a great service you have got this element right.

Anything else?

Yeah, keep on pushing forward and doing great things.

AppHarbor uses ASP.NET Health Monitoring to log and display exceptions thrown by applications running on the platform. Enterprising AppHarbor users have used this feature for debugging purposes by throwing exceptions from their their code. Throwing an exception is inconvenient however, since doing so interrupts normal program flow.

Below is a simple example demonstrating how to subvert ASP.NET Health Monitoring and make AppHarbor log messages. Logged messages are available for inspection in the application Error Display and logging messages like this does not involve throwing an exception.

Note that this is not anything like a replacement for application event tracking solutions such as Airbrake or Logentries, but it's pretty neat if you just need a simple way to output some debugging information while your application is running on AppHarbor.

using System;
using System.Web.Management;
using System.Web.Mvc;

namespace ErrorLoggingSample.Controllers
{
    public class ErrorController : Controller
    {
        public ActionResult Index()
        {
            new LogEvent("message to myself").Raise();
            return View();
        }
    }

    public class LogEvent : WebRequestErrorEvent
    {
        public LogEvent(string message)
            : base(null, null, 100001, new Exception(message))
        {
        }
    }
}

As of today, you can provision StillAlive as an add-on to AppHarbor applications. StillAlive is a great way make sure your application is functioning correctly beyond just checking that accessing front page gives a HTTP 200 response. With StillAlive you can write test recipes checking that your login flow works, for example. This is a great feature for frequently updated AppHarbor applications

The StillAlive guys have written guides on Installing StillAlive and Creating your first Test Recipe.

Today, we have added Cloudmailin and JustOneDB to the AppHarbor add-on catalog.

Cloudmailin is an incredibly simple way to let you AppHarbor-hosted application receive emails without having to mess with SMTP servers. Simply provision the Cloudmailin add-on, configure Cloudmailin to POST to an url in your app that can receive Cloudmailin posts and hand out the Cloudmailin-provided email address to people that should send emails to your app. There's additional documentation on how to get started with CloudMailin on the AppHarbor support site.

JustOneDB is a fast, no admin, no tuning general purpose database designed and built for the cloud. You can interact with JustOneDB using either a REST API or though a PostgreSQL-compatible interface. We have written a complete sample MVC app using NHibernate interacting with JustOneDB through the PostgreSQL interface. Additional JustOneDB documentation is available on the AppHarbor support site.

We hope you'll take advantage of Cloudmailin and JustOneDB and all the other add-ons in our catalog to quickly build great .NET apps running on AppHarbor. We're working hard on adding many more add-ons to the catalog.

When you visit appharbor.com you will now be browsing the new and redesigned AppHarbor website. We're really happy with the way the new site looks and feels and we hope you will have the same experience using it. A sea dragon called Frode was adopted as part of the redesign and we hope you'll give him a warm welcome too.

If you look under the covers of the new design, you will notice plenty of HTML5 goodness and there is plenty more coming as we build out the interactive features of the new design.

We're getting stickers, t-shirts, sea-dragon-shaped thumb-drives and all the other schwag-paraphernalia of a startup so that you can soon show-off that you use AppHarbor to build and host .NET applications.

We know there are some nooks and crannies that need a little more work (and we need to port the new design to the blog) and we'll be attending to that over the next few weeks. If you find anything that's broken or not looking right in your browser of choice then don't hesitate to report it to support@appharbor.com.

We're excited to announce that AirBrake is now in the AppHarbor add-on catalog. AirBrake is a great way to track errors and exceptions in your AppHarbor hosted application. We have written a short guide to get you started logging errors to AirBrake from your AppHarbor application.

We have just flicked the switch and you can now provision paid add-ons for your AppHarbor applications. You can also upgrade already provisioned add-ons from free plan to paid plans.

When we launched add-ons, only free plans were available. This was because we wanted to iron out any kinks in the add-ons and in the provisioning flow, before taking your money. We are excited that AppHarbor users now have full access to the powerful add-ons in the AppHarbor add-on catalog.

Prices quoted in the catalog are per-month and per-application that you provision the add-on to. Prices are pro-rated for months where the add-on was not provisioned the entire month. To provision or upgrade to a paid add-on, you have to provide a valid credit card in the same way as when trialling scaling

We are aware that add-ons can nominally be shared by multiple applications if you are willing to copy around configuration variables. This practice is not recommended and not supported. This is because add-on providers may at any time update the configuration variables for a provisioned add-on. This may for happen, for example, if an add-on provider's server crashes and your application needs to be made aware of what new server to use. Applications with configuration variables copy-pasted from another application will not get the new configuration values until you actively copy-paste and push the updates.

The Sequelizer add-on has had a 10GB trial plan since AppHarbor's inception. That will now become a paid plan offered for $10/month. If you have provisioned 10GB Sequelizer add-ons and your account has a valid credit card, we will start charging effective December 1. Accounts with no credit card will have a grace period lasting until December 1, after which we will downgrade databases to the free plan (20MB). If the database contains too much data to be downgraded, it will be placed in read-only mode. If you have Sequelizer databases provisioned to any of your AppHarbor applications, please verify that they are provisioned with the plans you want.

Paid add-ons marks the second step of AppHarbor beginning to take money for the services we provide (the first step was taking credit card details to enable scaling). Your input in this process is greatly valued and we encourage comments on this post or emails to support@appharbor.com if you have thoughts on add-on pricing or want to let us know what you would pay for AppHarbor deployment and scaling.

Note that some add-on providers in the AppHarbor catalog do not currently support changing plans. For those add-ons, you will have to remove the add-on from your application and then reprovision it with the plan you want.

Last week, IndexTank announced that they have been bought by LinkedIn. At AppHarbor, we're incredibly happy for the IndexTank team and wish them the best in their future ventures as part of LinkedIn.

For AppHarbor users, the acquisition means that provisioning IndexTank to AppHarbor applications is no longer possible, and that the IndexTank has been removed from the add-on catalog. IndexTank add-ons provisioned on AppHarbor before the announcement still work, and will continue to due so for another six months. We will contact AppHarbor users using the IndexTank add-on with additional details.

The concept of virtualization has been around for some time. Virtualization is really just the abstraction of an actual entity or construct into logical representations of those entities or constructs. Most of the time, the term “virtualization” is tied to server virtualization — a technology made popular by VMware, Microsoft, Xen, etc.

However, while server virtualization is the hot trend in enterprise IT, storage virtualization is making significant strides in functionality; people just do not realize it yet.

Storage virtualization involves abstracting the physical data storage process to more logical constructs inside of the storage device. Let’s take a quick look at how storage virtualization is taking shape:

Traditional storage: Single disk

• A data consumer issues read/write requests. The disk controller either reads or writes to specific locations on disk.

RAID: Multiple disk

• This is one of the most widely used implementations for storage virtualization. While it may not seem like it, the data storage environment is indeed virtualized.
• Multiple disks are aggregated into a storage structure to increase storage, increase resiliency, or both.
• A data consumer issues read/write requests. The storage controller determines which storage devices contain the data, compute the entire request from multiple devices (potentially), and return it to the consumer. The data is no longer on a single device.

LUN: Multiple logical storage devices

• This takes RAID to the next level.
• A group of disks are placed into an array structure. The disks are aggregated in some fashion (typically in RAID levels). However, a subset of the allocated capacity is divided and presented to a data consumer as a LUN. The LUN is a logical storage device for a consumer.

Storage pooling: Spanning multiple drive array types

• Multiple tiers of storage are created based on storage device profile (capacity and performance), typically a RAID group or other physical storage enclosures.
• The storage device creates a higher-level structure, called a pool, of which the various performance tiers are members. The pool structure is presented to the data consumer at the LUN level.
• The storage controller stores metadata about which data blocks reside in which tier, and their location inside the tier.

Data migration: Moving data around

• Building on top of storage pools, storage controllers (via metadata) are able to determine the data access patterns for individual blocks of data.
• Frequently used data is moved to the highest performing tier of disk while less frequently accessed data is moved to the lower performing tier of disk.
• This migration occurs without the knowledge of the data consumer. The consumer sees the storage as a LUN and does not know (or care) about what happens as long as the data is available.

Deduplication: Sharing common data

• Many data structures share the same data patterns. Microsoft Word files share the same framework across all files, regardless of content. Microsoft Windows servers all have common files. Conceptually, deduplication addresses the idea of “Why store multiple copies of the same data over and over again?”
• Based on the type of algorithm, the storage device processes existing data to determine if any duplicate data exists.
• In the event of duplicate data, the storage controller creates pointers to the common data. Common blocks are replaced by a pointer, and the overall storage footprint is reduced.

Thin provisioning: Not allocating storage at creation time

• This functionality operates under the theory that space may be allocated but never fully used, resulting in unused space that cannot be used by anyone else.
• The storage controller receives a request to allocate space for a data consumer. The controller creates the basic framework that represents a LUN. However, internal to the storage device, the space is not allocated. Rather, the LUN is basically authorized to consume a specific amount of disk space.
• As the disk consumer continues to use storage space, the LUN grows on the storage controller until the LUN size is completely allocated. Until the LUN is fully utilized, the unused space can be used for other purposes.
• This may result in over-allocation of storage, though, and needs monitoring.

Storage Virtualization Continues to Advance

As you can see, from traditional file storage to thin provisioning, storage virtualization has played a major role in advancing how we use our storage infrastructure and reap the benefits from our investments.

Storage virtualization techniques and technology continue to advance. Object storage, pNFS, and server virtualization functional offload will become more commonplace as new storage device models and feature sets are developed and introduced.

Storage virtualization is not the process of storing virtual machine disks. Rather, it is a beast of its own, and continues to provide valuable benefits.

It's finally here -- the final release of Nimbus Infrastructure 2.9!

The major additions in this release are support for Availability Zones, configurable EC2 multi-core instances, more robust support for LANTorrent and new administration tools which allow administrators to easily control VMs running on their cloud. The administrators can also choose to give more information to the user, e.g., allow them to inspect on what physical machines a their virtual machines are running.

In addition, the release also includes bugfixes and additions to documentation. Check out the changelog for full details.

As always, we want to express our gratitude to our open source community for their contributions to this release. We would like to particularly acknowledge the work of Rob Rusnak who contributed the administrative tools as part of the Google Summer of Code project and Shao, Hsin (Jeff) who helped with LANTorrent testing. The features in this release were supported by the GSoC, OOI, and FutureGrid projects.

The Nimbus Infrastructure 2.9 release is available for download at: http://www.nimbusproject.org/downloads/

Documentation is available at: http://www.nimbusproject.org/docs/2.9/

StartupCamp5 will be taking place at ITExpo Feb 1-3 at the Miami Beach Convention Center. I’ve attended the past four ITExpo’s and StartupCamps, but won’t be at this one. Feeling a bit wistful as so many people I know are heading that way. ITExpo is a good show – particularly strong for hosted service providers and VoIP heads. Lots of really technical people roaming the halls too.

But every year, the most excitement at ITExpo is around Startup Camp. Embrase puts on this event every year -and unlike all the other co-located events that take place there – StartupCamp doesn’t compete for the same audience. StartupCamp is the one event that runs in the early evening – after the exhibits and before dinner. As a result, it is one of the most packed events there – more so than the keynote presentations (although that be because of the free drinks).

StartupCamp runs in a launch-pad format – but it is telecom focused. It starts with a keynote presentation. Bob Metcalfe did an excellent keynote at StartupCamp4 in Austin, listen to it below. This year, the keynote is Sir Terry Matthews – cofounder of Mitel, and about 30 other telecom companies. After the keynote, each entrepreneur makes a short pitch and then gets torn to shreds by a panel of esteemed judges. This year, the judges include  PhoneTag founder Jamie Siminoff and Cbeyond co-founder Brooks Robinson. At the end, the audience also gets to pick a favorite. The presenting companies this year are:

• Townhall 140 was founded with the singular goal of harnessing technology to promote civic engagement. Launched out of the Harvard Innovation Lab in November 2011, the Townhall 140 virtual platform integrates video technology with real-time voting to bring constituents face-to-face with political influencers on the issues that matter.
• CallTrunk sees the spoken word as the ‘left-behind’ in the march of technology. While searchable records of written conversations are standard, talking — our most natural form of communicating albeit one that allows room for error, uncertainty and dispute — has fallen between the cracks. Based in London, CallTrunk’s mission is to make the spoken word accountable and verifiable, capturing spoken conversations by automatically recording phone calls, securely storing them on the web and openly integrating with leading productivity applications.
• Vernoa, based in Israel, believes that the Internet is no longer a luxury – it’s a necessity. And therefore should be compared to usage base utility services such as Electricity, Gas and Water. Yet unlike other utilities, the demand for capacity will always exceed availability, making it a must for service providers to manage user expectation and their networks. Vernoa will provide the only service to offer smart-meter like functionality for telecommunications carriers.
• LawLoop.com revolutionizes legal enterprise software by fully integrating the next generation of front and back-office software, in the cloud, through an online business-networking platform. LawLoop.com allows legal professionals to communicate and share documents seamlessly and securely and to more efficiently manage billable time-keeping, bank accounts, and client invoices.

StartupCamp is a fun event – electric really. I’ve written about it before here.

Larry Lisser, a senior partner at Embrase, brought some expertise to the Innovation Showcase. Larry keeps a close ear to the tele-startup community. The Innovation Showcase won’t be taking place until late March, but the deadline to apply is Feb 1.

 

Dr. Bob Metcalfe Keynote (Metcalfe is commonly spelled without an “e”, but if you invent Ethernet, you get one on the end of your name.)

Dr. Bob Metcalfe (Video)

 

(Cross-posted @ TalkingPointz)

We recently released BitNami LAMP WAMP and MAMP Stacks with Symfony 2.0.9, a popular development framework (the *AMP Stacks also bundle other frameworks like ZendFramework, CodeIgniter and CakePHP). In this post, we will walk you step by step through how to start a project with Symfony in the Amazon Cloud using a BitNami LAMP Stack AMI.
First, you will need an Amazon acount to access the AWS Console. You can find how to create your account here (note that they have a free tier which provides you with a free micro instance for a year). Once you login to the AWS Console, go to the EC2 tab and launch a new Instance. You can locate the BitNami LAMP Stack image by searching in the Community AMIs tab for "lampstack-5.3.9-0", which is the latest version at the time of this writing.

AWS Community AMIs
Another option is to launch directly from the BitNami website. You can select your preferred region (United States, Europe or Asia) and the architecture (32 or 64 bits) and click on the appropriate link. Then, you can set different parameters from the AWS Console: availability zone, ssh key, the image type (micro, small, medium) and the security group. Once the machine is started, access it by typing the public DNS name in a browser. You should see something similar to the screenshot below.
LAMPStack welcome page

The next step involves connecting to the machine. You can download the private SSH key from your Amazon account. If you want to connect to the machine from Windows using the popular tool Putty, you will need to convert your private key to the .PPK format. Take a look at this tutorial if you are not sure how to perform this conversion.
On Linux or OS X, you can open a Terminal and run the following command:

$ ssh -i /path/to/your/private/key.pem bitnami@ec2-xx-xx-xx-amazonaws.com

You will see a welcome message similar to:

BitNami welcome message


All the required files for the Symfony framework are in the "/opt/bitnami" folder:

ctlscript.sh: It is the main script to start and stop the servers.
frameworks/symfony: The Symfony 2 framework files.
apache2: The Apache server files.
php: The PHP language files.
mysql: The MySQL database files.

One of the advantages of this structure is that you can install the BitNami LAMP Stack on your own desktop machine, develop your application locally and then migrate the full directory directly to the cloud.
You can edit the files online with a command line editor (nano, vim, emacs) but many people prefer to edit files with a graphical editor locally. Using an SFTP client like FileZilla, you can edit the files from your computer. If you need help, see our how-to for configuration instructions.
In the first place, you can check the requirements:
$ cd /opt/bitnami/frameworks/symfony/app $ php check.php
You will see a message similar to:
******************************** *                              * *  Symfony requirements check  * *                              * ********************************
php.ini used by PHP: /opt/bitnami/php/etc/php.ini
** WARNING ** *  The PHP CLI can use a different php.ini file *  than the one used with your web server. *  If this is the case, please ALSO launch this *  utility from your web server. ** WARNING **
** Mandatory requirements **
  OK        Checking that PHP version is at least 5.3.2 (5.3.9 installed)   OK        Checking that the "date.timezone" setting is set   OK        Checking that app/cache/ directory is writable   OK        Checking that the app/logs/ directory is writable   OK        Checking that the json_encode() is available   OK        Checking that the SQLite3 or PDO_SQLite extension is available   OK        Checking that the session_start() is available   OK        Checking that the ctype_alpha() is available   OK        Checking that the token_get_all() is available   OK        Checking that the APC version is at least 3.0.17
** Optional checks **
  OK        Checking that the PHP-XML module is installed   ...

A simple way to start learning Symfony is via the Quick Tour that you can access via web. To enable it, you should uncomment the following line that you can find in the Apache configuration file /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/httpd.conf:
Include "/opt/bitnami/frameworks/symfony/conf/symfony.conf"
and restart the Apache server:
$ ./ctlscript.sh restart apache
The Symfony welcome application is only accessible from localhost. In this case you can create a SSH tunnel to access the application. You can check how to access phpMyAdmin or Symfony application here.
Symfony welcome page
That's all! You can configure the database settings in the parameters.ini file or you be able to change the configuration via web.

Circa 1993, when only the senior executives were lucky enough to have 17-inch monitors, businesses would buy floppy disks full of imagery called clip art. One of those images was a bubbly cloud. Originally, this represented the telephone network. Then it came to represent the Internet, and now the cloud represents a cloud - well, not really. Let's take a look at what's happened to this...

 

Meet Ayesha, a Customer Success Manager at GoodData. Ayesha manages the success of a GoodData customer's project from start to finish. She works with client like Gazelle, Pandora, and Enterasys on planning and implementing their project requirements. From what to measure, how to visualize and how to analyze the data, Ayesha ensures best practices and domain expertise are incorporated into every project.

One of her favorite GoodData features is the ability to snapshot. Data is interesting and becomes extra valuable when analyzed from a trending perspective. The gauge report, on the right, reveals the actual quarterly opportunities against a quota and shows only a "point in time" view into the revenue. The missing piece to the gauge report is the ability to measure revenue at any point in time and analyze overtime.

The line charts on the left reveals closed business versus the quarterly goal, with the blue line indicating the total revenue closed by week.  By capturing a full snapshot each week, it is possible to identify trends in the overall movement of the data. The following two line charts go well beyond the "point in time " view of the sales pipelines and reveal changes in pipeline over the quarter. 

This snapshot report answers the question, “When did we close the most revenue?”  Weeks four and eleven presented the biggest jumps in closed revenue. 

The final report is set with a defined drill-in. In this case, clicking on the W6 revenue will create a new chart, breaking down the specific point by sales reps. The new chart answers, “Which sales reps have closed the most revenue this quarter?”

What will snapshots tell you about your data?

You can now add up to 10 tags to any of your Auto Scaling Groups. You can also, if you'd like, propagate the tags to the EC2 instances launched from your groups.

Adding tags to your Auto Scaling groups will make it easier for you to identify and distinguish them.

Each tag has a name, a value, and an optional propagation flag. If the flag is set, then the corresponding tag will be applied to EC2 instances launched from the group. You can use this feature to label or distinguish instances created by distinct Auto Scaling groups. You might be using multiple groups to support multiple scalable applications, or multiple scalable tiers or components of a single application. Either, way the tags can help you to keep your instances straight.

Read more in the newest version of the Auto Scaling Developer Guide.

-- Jeff;

VIENNA, Va., Jan. 23, 2012 —NJVC®, one of the largest information technology solutions providers supporting the U.S. Department of Defense, and Virtual Global, a premier provider of software and cloud computing platform solutions for a variety of industry and federal customers, announce the release of a joint white paper, “Platform as a Service (Paas): What Is It? Why Is It So Important?.”   The paper clarifies the confusion surrounding PaaS for IT decision makers in the federal government. The National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) suggests PaaS as a component of the Federal Cloud Computing Reference Architecture, but one major challenge exists: Most buyers do not understand what PaaS is, why it is important and how it can help federal agencies cut development costs by more than 50 percent.

“Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel said that platform as a service is the next major value set for federal cloud computing, and it also aligns closely with his Shared Services initiative to knock down stovepipe software and save money,” said Kevin Jackson, co-author and general manager, NJVC cloud services. “I hope that this whitepaper will help raise awareness of its importance in the federal marketplace.”
Many PaaS vendors require their customers to make long-term commitments to proprietary infrastructures. Some early adopters of PaaS unknowingly have already made casual, long-term commitments to infrastructure providers. “It's somewhat like buying gum at the counter, but needing to rent the store for 10 years,” said Cary Landis, co-author and Virtual Global senior platform architect and founder. “That is why NIST is stressing the importance of openness and portability. IT buyers must understand PaaS to make the right decisions early.”

PaaS makes it possible for software developers to participate in the cloud. Until recently, the cloud has been dominated by big email and infrastructure providers selling commodity services.  “PaaS changes the landscape—it opens the playing field to hundreds of thousands of software developers and integrators, giving them a way to actively participate,” according to Jackson. “Whereas the first wave of cloud computing was about consolidating data centers, the PaaS wave is about consolidating applications. It will be a more complex ride, but the savings will be greater,” Landis said.

Download the white paper at no cost at http://www.slideshare.net/kvjacksn/njvcvirtual-global-paas-white-paper. NJVC and Virtual Global are team members on the GovCloud™ initiative.

### About NJVCWith a focus on information technology automation, NJVC specializes in supporting highly secure, complex IT enterprises in mission-critical environments, particularly for the intelligence and defense communities. We offer a wide breadth of IT and strategic solutions to our customers, ranging from strategic consulting to managed flexible services in five business areas:  Cloud Services, Cyber Security, Data Center Services, IT Services and Print Solutions.  Our global workforce includes dedicated and talented employees with 94 percent holding security clearances located at more than 170 customer sites. We partner with our customers to support their missions. To learn more, visit www.njvc.com.
About Virtual GlobalVirtual Global is a premier provider of software and cloud computing platform solutions for a variety of industry and federal clients. The SaaS Maker™ family of platform products is open and modular, so that you can integrate with existing open source, legacy and 3rd-party web services. It is also portable across data centers. http://www.virtualglobal.com

ContactMichelle Snyder, NJVC, 703.893.7609, michelle.snyder@njvc.com
Audra Capas, 5StarPR, 703.437.9301, audra@5starpr.com


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On tap for today, we've got a new jQuery Mobile release, a look at Tendril Connect, and the latest BitNami Stack for Ruby on Rails.

jQuery Mobile 1.0.1 Released – The jQuery Mobile folks have pushed 1.0.1 out the door. This fixes a bunch of issues and adds Samsung's Bada platform and Dolphin browser to the "officially supported" list. See the post for a full list of supported platforms and their "grades." If you're using iOS, Android and newer BlackBerry devices you should be fine.

Sponsor

Tendril courting developers for its cloud-delivered energy app platform – Tom Raftery takes a look at Tendril Connect. "The idea is to allow developers to build on Tendril's cloud platform and to deploy the developed applications on Tendril's Tendril Connect cloud platform. For developers this is an opportunity to develop applications addressing the energy challenge and have them deployed in a ready-made marketplace of up-to 70 million addressable households."

Smooth Scaling with Stackato and vSphere – Explaining how to run ActiveState's Stackato on vSphere.

Launch Relational Database Service Instances in the Virtual Private Cloud – Amazon has set it up so you can use their Relational Database Service (RDS) with their Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Works in all regions, except AWS GovCloud.

New RubyStack upgraded to Rails 3.2.0 – BitNami has upgraded its RubyStack to Rails 3.2.0. It now includes Ruby 1.9.3-p0, SQLite 3.7.3, and Nginx 1.0.10.

Have a cloud news tip for me? Drop me a note at jzb@readwriteweb.com or to @jzb on Twitter.

Discuss

Joyent customers are so smart and articulate. That’s why we invited them to speak on the Joyent sponsor panel at Node Summit on Tuesday. Why listen to us when our customers can tell the story of using Node.js better than we can?

We taped the panel, so here’s their conversation about why they decided to use Node in their businesses. (Not a great view but the sound’s good! [MP3])

The session was moderated by John Rymer, Forrester Research analyst and expert on enterprise middleware. John had some good questions.

Customers Colin Rand, Associate Director of Technology at AKQA, Glen Lougheed, CEO of NodeFly Systems, and Jevon MacDonald, Co-Founder and CEO of GoInstant had a fantastic conversation about how they considered using Node.js from a business standpoint, and what it’s like to use a new technology that changes the way we think about how applications work for us.

Have a look or a listen.