Cool and Refreshing!

We at CFT are proud to announce the latest refresh of our Elastic Server On-Demand service.

So you don't have to read posts below, Elastic Servers(tm) are application stacks which can be dynamically constructed from component libraries and delivered in many virtualization-ready formats (VMware, Xen, Parallels). We call them "elastic" because it is just the amount of components you want for a task, no more no less. Fat stacks, skinny stacks, your call.

Also, we are acutely aware of how dynamic data centers are becoming; both in the enterprise and through "prosumer" services like Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). So we are helping you get ready for the world of clouds coming our way.



















Here are just some of the features now available to our community members:

- WAAAYY improved user interface. (Don't get me wrong, I liked the old one - I love this one)

- New community dashboard information, including seeing other servers being built

- Enter your Amazon EC2 credentials and now you can autodeploy a server to EC2

- Even more components in the community directory (including Ruby/Rails related items)

- A Ruby on Rails microsite to ease building RoR-based Elastic Servers

- Community ratings for component packages

- Community ratings for pre-built Elastic Servers on the download site

- Firewall manager added to the Elastic Server manager

- End-user microsite tools are coming ever closer; we will be letting a few community members alpha test this piece. Let us know if you are interested.

- End user component package build/upload tool is coming ever closer. We are testing it out internally as part of this release

- And more....

We are increasing the number of private beta users we can accept for this refresh - so if you haven't requested a registration yet get on board now!

IT Weather Forecast: Clouds Ahead

Three cool bits of news came out of Amazon this week. (Fair disclosure, one of these has a high degree of self interest on my part.)

First, Amazon opened up the Elastic Compute Cloud to all comers. Open registration now exists for getting 10 Cents per hour computing infrastructure. It is great for quick set up, test and tear down. Open sign-ups are here.

Second, Amazon now has "big" instance types. Instances in the EC2 cloud (what we at CohesiveFT call Elastic Servers(tm), now come in different sizes, going as big as 15 gig of memory and 4 "virtual" cores. Good stuff for the EC2 early adopters who have been memory and compute bound.

Third, we are thrilled that AWS evangelist Jeff Barr blogged about our Elastic Server On-Demand. Since his post yesterday many hundreds of people have hit our demo video and new requests for access to our private beta are surging in.

Clouds. EC2 is a great example of how smooth the provisioning, deployment and management of infrastructure can be. At CFT we think Amazon is blazing a trail that other large scale, retail-oriented, information provides will follow. Keep yours eyes open for GoogleCloud, EbayCloud and more to follow.