Jaunty Jackalope and Debian Lenny Join the Party!

Ubuntu's Jaunty Jackalope and Debian's Lenny Linux-based operating systems are now available for inclusion in your Elastic Servers! If you read this blog with any regularity, a common thread you might notice is the constant addition of components, virtual formats, cloud formats, and operating systems to the configuration and deployment options we make available to our Elastic Server users. Visit the Elastic Server factory and build a couple Jackalope or Lenny servers today.

Ok enough promo... What does the Elastic Server and its many server configuration and deployment options really mean to you?

For Virtualization Guys
When the marketing wave of virtualization hit a few years ago, some pretty clever guys in the space coined the term P2V or "Physical-to-Virtual." It was the practice of taking an existing physical server and migrating or converting of all the data on a hard-drive (operating system, data, application programs, etc.) to a virtual machine guest hosted on a virtualization platform. An entire niche market popped up in the virtualization industry with large and small players pushing their products and services around P2V.

What did this really accomplish? IT managers who were instructed to virtualize the datacenter, because an executive sat through a sexy presentation out west, could virtualize with minor impact on their current operational practices. These projects did little to help realize the benefits of server virtualization (increase server optimization, lower number of physical servers, reduce hardware maintenance costs, and increase the space utilization efficiency in your data center). The P2V'd servers still had all the bloatware (technical term) from the physical servers, there was some impact on increasing overall server optimization, but little to no impact on organizational agility.

The benefits of server virtualization are amplified considerably when virtual servers are created from scratch only including the components needed to run one specific app. We have called this Z2V or 'Zero-to-Virtual' or building a virtual server from scratch (with no intervening physical server). So you are a proponent of P2V? Great! But what about when you have no more physical servers to virtualize anyway? Z2V'd servers also give the added benefits of preventing one application from having an impact on another application when upgrades or changes are made. With Z2V development of a standard virtual server build that can be easily duplicated with speed and quality is a snap. The Elastic Server factory is the place to select a custom bill-of-materials, assemble, deploy, and track your shiny new Z2V server.

For the Cloud Guys
The cloud is the new black... And when I say cloud computing I mean Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Everyone wants to be able to tell their neighbors they have some server up in the cloud, well maybe not everyone. Regardless of how tech savvy your neighbors are, the cloud is available today and offers many tasty benefits. So what's next? You want to get a Ruby on Rails server up at Amazon's EC2 so you can start building out and testing your app? You can do one of three things:

1. Start with a base OS Amazon Machine Image (AMI), launch it at EC2 and start compiling and installing your components and libs. If you're good this will only take an hour or two, if not... set aside a weekend.


2. Wade through Amazon's "organizationally and metaphorically challenged" catalog of user submitted Public AMIs until you find a preconfigured template that's close enough to what you wanted. BTW the Ruby on Rails AMIs available are either chock-full of multiple flavors of components (DBs, webservers, gems, etc.) or are run on old OSs (Ubuntu 7.04 and FC8). A classic Goldilocks dilemma begins.


3. Use the Elastic Server Factory to build and deploy your custom Ruby on Rails Elastic Server in minutes. Select components from grouped categories (Rails version, Web Container, DB, and Gems), choose an operating system, an EC2 size, name your server and click build. The Factory takes your bill-of-materials and assembles your server to your specs on-demand. When it's finished assembling it can upload the completed AMI to your EC2 account for use immediately! Why use static when you can customize your server to your needs?

Aaannnd Scene.