Slicehost

We have the Slicehost Ops team in from San Antonio (Major, Ant and John) on this short podcast. Topics include bandwidth tweaks, the maintenance events in May and their day-to-day work. Intro Cha Cha Cha from the Go soundtrack, outro is Dirty Robot (Tofu remix). Enjoy!

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We’ve found that one of our primary switches in the DFW1 datacenter needs to be replaced as soon as possible. The emergency maintenance is planned for this evening at 2AM GMT (9PM CDT) and it should be very brief.

Since our environment has redundant switching, the downtime should only be a matter of seconds. In the worst case scenario, the downtime should be less than 60 seconds. As soon as the switch is successfully replaced, we will provide an update regarding the network’s status.

We apologize for the short notice for this maintenance and for any inconvenience that it may cause. Thank you for your support!

UPDATE AT 2:45AM GMT: The maintenance is now complete and the switching has been thoroughly tested after the replacement. If you’re experiencing any on-going issues, please contact us at any time.

Just a reminder, tomorrow I’m headed to Velocity and then SF Cloudcamp in the evening. Several Rackspace folks will be at Structure, later in the week. On Thursday night we’re having a Slicehost/Rackspace meetup at the 21st Amendment starting at 6pm. Hope to see you around! Send me an email if you’d like to meet (matt@slicehost.com).

Everyone loves an update and today we’ve got a few for you:

Cloning – we mentioned this on our last podcast and it’s now live. You can create a new slice from the image of a running slice – cloning. Previously backups were required as the source of a cloned slice (that method remains available as well).

Bandwidth Cap Increase – Slices now have a bandwidth cap tied to their size, previously all slices had a 10mbps cap. 256slices start at 10mbps for the public interface and 20mbps for the private interface. The public interface increases by 10mbps with each size and the private interface is now 2x the public. For example: a 1024slice now has a 30mbps public interface cap and a 60mbps private interface cap, a 15.5GBslice has a 70mbps pulbic and a 140mbps private cap.

Lower RHEL pricing – now $22/month per slice, down from $36/month.

Thanks to our dev and ops team for their work bringing these features to production. If you have any questions please let us know. Enjoy!

I’m headed East for the Washington DC Cloud Camp this Wednesday. Next week it’s off to San Francisco for the anniversary of the first Cloud Camp. I love meeting Slicehosters at these events. Tickets are free and the camps deliver a good crowd and great conversations. Hope to see you there! If you can’t make it, ping me (matt@slicehost.com or @zenmatt) and we can grab food/coffee/drinks.

Couldn’t resist reposting this story from our forum:

The Slicehost iPhone App came handy when on vacation in May… A customer called stating they couldn’t get into my server, I was able to go into the app, confirm the status of it and make sure it was up. After they still couldn’t, I got onto the app store and bought iSSH and SSH’ed into it from the beach (Daytona). I don’t have a SIM card in it, but was able to piggyback off of one of the many hotel’s WiFi connections.

There will be an emergency maintenance window for STL-A on 06-02 from 0400-0600 GMT. This is a follow-up to the XO networking problems experienced earlier in the week by some customers. During this window, STL-A customers may notice brief connectivity issues as routes are updated. Should you experience any problems, please come by the chatroom or contact support. Thank you for your patience as we address these issues.

DATE: 06-02-2009

TIME: 0400-0600 GMT

IMPACT: Short delays in connectivity as routes change.

There will be an emergency maintenance window for STL-A on 06-01 from 0400-0600 GMT. This is a follow-up to the XO networking problems experienced earlier in the week by some customers. During this window, STL-A customers may notice brief connectivity issues as routes are updated. Should you experience any problems, please come by the chatroom or contact support. Thank you for your patience as we address these issues.

DATE: 06-01-2009

TIME: 0400-0600 GMT

IMPACT: Short delays in connectivity as routes change.

UPDATE: Canceled, to be rescheduled.

We’re decommissioning 2 fiber connections and activating 2 new connections tomorrow in STL-B. We will be onsite. working in tandem with our NOC and datacenter technicians to manage the event. No impact is expected. Should you experience any networking problems that you feel are related to this maintenance, please get in touch with our support team. Thanks!

DATE: 05-29-2009

TIME: 2000-2100 GMT

IMPACT: No impact expected.

As promised in our nameserver maintenance post, we have another maintenance event taking place on Saturday 06-06-2009 from 0400-0500 GMT. During this window, we’ll be rearranging the internal servers that power SliceManager.

DATE: Saturday June 6th

TIME: 0400-500 GMT

EVENT: Internal infrastructure changes

IMPACT: SliceManager, Slicehost API, new customer signups, slice resizes/rebuilds – all will be unavailable during the window. Your slices will remain up and running.

We’ll send out reminder tweets and update Slicehost Status during the maintenance window. If you have any questions, please get in touch with our support team. Thanks!

Hot on the heels of the Slicehost iPhone news, Mike Mayo announced Slicehost for Android today. It’s available now at the Android Market, check it out and let us know what you think!

I’m headed to Boston this week for TiECON East. How about a Slicehost meet-up? Wednesday night would be great for a bigger gathering and I’m free Thursday for some one-on-one meetings before I head to the conference. I’ll be staying downtown, so please shoot me an email/tweet (matt@slicehost or @zenmatt) and keep an eye on this post for more details.

Update Meetup on Wednesday, 8pm at Flash’s – 312 Stuart St

Update 2 – We’re moving the location to the Grafton Street Pub & Grill at 1230 Massachusetts Avenue to coincide with a previously scheduled meetup. We’ll be joined by Emil Sayegh, GM of the Rackspace Cloud, who is in town for the MIT CIO Symposium.

Last night we upgraded the software on all of our secondary, internal routers. Tonight, starting around 0300 GMT, we’ll be failing over to the secondary devices and upgrading the primaries. We do not expect any customer impact and the Slicehost/Rackspace NOC will be monitoring the upgrade process. If you experience any networking difficulties, please contact our support team or stop by chat.slicehost.com. Thank you!

We’re making some planned infrastructure changes during the month of May. The first of these changes involve our namerservers: ns1.slicehost.net, ns2.slicehost.net and ns3.slicehost.net. Currently ns1 and ns2 are located in STL-A, ns3 is offsite. Next week, ns1 will move to DFW, ns2 will move to STL-B and ns3 will remain offsite. An outline of what’s taking place next week is below.

DATE: Tuesday May 5

EVENT: We’ll be changing the slicehost.net authoritative DNS records with our registrar.

IMPACT: The only people affected by this event will be those who have hardcoded our nameserver IPs into applications or configuration files (instead of using ns1/ns2/ns3). It’s atypical to hardcode IPs, but we understand people have their reasons. If you did hardcode the IPs, we recommend changing them ASAP to ns1.slicehost.net, ns2.slicehost.net and ns3.slicehost.net.

DATE: Saturday May 9 0400-0430 GMT

EVENT: Backend changes on our DNS application.

IMPACT: During this window, customers using our nameservers will be unable to modify their records.

If you have any questions about the planned events above, please get in touch with our support team. We have another event tentatively scheduled for May 22, a blog post explaining these changes will be posted in a week or so. Thank you!

Emil Sayegh, GM of the Rackspace Cloud (our boss!), joins the podcast during his recent visit to St. Louis. We discuss what’s been going on at Slicehost, mention some upcoming events (Lunch 2.0, Railsconf) and answer a ton of customer tweets and questions. The intro is ‘Sugarfoot’ by Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears, outro is ‘The Mission’ by Puscifer. Enjoy!

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