Softlayer Autoscaling

One thing I am using more and more in my Softlayer environments is the autoscaling feature. Having the ability to meet compute demands in peak times, and reduce costs when it’s quiet is invaluable. Sounds good right? So what actually is Softlayers autoscaling feature?

Autoscale is a free service configured from the Softlayer portal or the Softlayer API. It allows you to scale in and out based on different healthcheck style policies. More commonly than not, the autoscale pool will be behind a local or global load balancer. However, this is not a requirement. Applications that can scale in a cluster can be done in a pool without any load balancing.

I recently setup an autoscale pool for a project I am working on codenamed ‘Pheonix’. It is incredibly simple to do and along with some pre defined scripts and images (which I will show below). When scaling out, there is 0 manual intervention involved when a server is added.

Hit the link below for a walkthrough!

Backup

One thing that is sometimes overlooked in ‘cloud’ is backup. People assume that because their infrastructure isn’t in their datacenter anymore that disks won’t fail, users won’t delete the wrong file or DB corruptions won’t occur. Sometimes you will get away with it, but I sleep better at night knowing that my systems are being backed up on a nightly basis.

So how does Softlayer handle this critical operation?

Softlayer provides two ‘traditional’ OS level backup products. eVault and Idera (or R1Soft Backup). each product has its place in an IaaS solution.

Netapp AltaVault to serve up Object Storage

I’m currently investigating the use of Netapps’ Virtual appliance “AltaVault” Cold Storage, formally Steelstore.

I want it to serve up Softlayer Object Storage as CIFS and NFS volumes to Virtual servers in Softlayer.  This product (If it works as I think it is going to) can carve up Object storage to provide cheap, slowish, elastic shares to servers.  It provides cache to help boost performance, provides encryption, deduplication and compression.

Check it out here NetApp AltaVault I’ll keep you informed of how I go with this investigation.