Sproing!! Elastic Server On-Demand 1.0

CohesiveFT is proud to announce the open availability of Elastic Server On-Demand 1.0. We were in closed beta since last July, learned a lot and incorporated it into our platform. We officially launched 1.0 on Feb. 19th and have completed some post-launch tweaks, including a new automatic guest mode requiring no registration.

Here is a quick recap for those of you who haven't heard about Elastic Servers before now:

Elastic Servers are customer-configured, multi-sourced application stacks built dynamically in virtualization-ready formats and made available for download, or for autodeployment to EC2 with your Amazon credentials. More autodeploy "cloud" options coming here in 2008.

Why do we call them "Elastic Servers"? Basically we are out to let customers build the stack they want - with no more - no less in it - and deployed in new dynamic forms like virtualization containers. We currently support VMware, Parallels, XenSource and Amazon AMIs.

Lots of New Stuff!

• Community edition with no registration required. You can use the service to build or download 3 virtual machine servers. Later, you can claim your account and register if you like while the browser session is still active.
  
• Personal Edition Trial. Create your own component assembly portals! Manage your virtual stacks privately or become a community editor by having your private portal published for others to use.
• Server Templates. Now useful community servers can be defined as templates. This allows each user who builds a new server from a template to get a unique internal ID for future patch and lifecycle features. Also, no more DHCP conflicts between VMs since we give each one its own unique MAC address.
  
• Shared EC2 credentials. You can allow friends to build and deploy EC2 images from your credentials. They can use them, but not see the credential details.
  
• Improved community dashboard with 45 day data window. See what types and formats of VMs are being built.
  
• Ability to add components to pre-defined server templates. Now you can pop a server definition from a community server or template into the Bundle Explorer for "ala carte" customizations.
• And drum roll please.....

"BUILD YOUR OWN" is now available.
The number one request we got out of the Private Beta was "that's great that I can build a Stack in minutes, how do I put my own code into an Elastic Server?" When we responded "rsync", people were bummed. What they were asking for was the ability to import code into ESOD, either into a community repository or a personal repository, and use it in a server definition. One of the goals of ESOD is to allow users to take their application stack ‘recipes’, capture them, and allow others to reproduce them as virtual servers automatically with both speed and quality. So the request for personal components should not have surprised us - but it kind of did.

We're back! And with this release you have the ability to import code into the system and make it available to others (or just yourself). We do this with "typed" uploads; we support WAR, JAR, Ruby App, Mule Endpoint and Filesystem Tree in this release with more types coming soon.

Future blog posts will show how easily this facility can be used to make turnkey servers available for others to use.

Please, come be a guest. Even better register and build a component portal for your perfect application or application stack - and we will publish it for others to use!