We performed our second Windows Azure Pack (WAP) update yesterday. Did your users notice it? Probably not, since websites were operational during the update.
One of the benefits of Azure Pack and the Everleap platform is the ability to roll out updates across all of the servers without any interruption in website availability. A significant improvement over traditional hosting where brief outages for updates are unavoidable. The roll out of the update actually went on all through the night and into this morning.
For traditional hosting, it is typical to display information about how much disk space and bandwidth your sites are using in the control panel.
Our control panel provides that data. But we know that customers want more insight into the behavior and health of their web applications. So we now deliver enhanced usage stats including memory usage, CPU usage, HTTP requests and errors.
In the Site Overview section of the control panel, we now display a point-in-time snapshot of the site’s usage stats. You can refresh the data but note that the data updates in our database every 1-2 minutes. Below I took a screenshot from the control panel of this very blog.
SSD Reserved Cloud Severs
We have many customers who are enjoying the performance of our Reserved Cloud Servers. I’m happy to announce that we’ve made them even better.
All Reserved Cloud Servers are now upgraded with high performance Solid State Drives (SSD) and with no additional cost. With this upgrade you should see an increase in site performance.
Mr. Ossou already alerted you to the upcoming Silicon Valley Code Camp (October 11th and 12th), but in the spirit of “more is more,” here’s my own personal announcement.
Maybe you’ve been to a code camp in your neighborhood. Los Angeles has three of them, and they’re all pretty sizable. But there’s sizable and then there’s huge, and Silicon Valley is huge. So multiply your local code camp by two or three times, then double that, and you’ll be pretty close to comprehending the crazy sea of humanity that attends Silicon Valley.
We just launched the latest sprint and we realized that we didn’t announce updates that were pushed out with the Windows Azure Pack update (though we did blog about how we did the WAP update). So here’s some of the enhancements that you’ll find now.
1. We’ve added the ability to bind different SSL certificates to your domain pointers and subdomains. Before this update you could only bind SSL certs for your primary domain. Now with this enhancement, you can bind SSL certs to your heart’s content. This applies to SNI SSL.
2. We’ve removed most restrictions from the DNS Manager to allow you more flexibility In managing your DNS. So now you can create multiple records with the same name, you can edit or delete the root domain A record, create CNAMEs with the root domain name, pretty much anything you might need.
The mother of all code camps is only weeks away.
Attendance for the Silicon Valley Code Camp is usually over 5,000 people and this year we are expecting even more. As long time supporters of code camps, user groups, and the ASP.NET community at large, I can tell you this is the big one.
In a DiscountASP.NET support ticket the other day someone said to me, “I don’t want to talk cloud. That is such a bogus term and concept.” I was telling him about Everleap, since it would have been a good solution for a problem he was having, but I understand why he reacted like that.
The term “cloud” has been misused and abused to the point where it has become meaningless to a lot of people. Often when we talk to people about the modern hosting platform we’re running here and say to them, “You might want to try our Everleap Cloud Servers,” they just roll their eyes and sigh.
We announced previously that we partnered with SiteLock to bring our customers website security solutions which includes a free level of basic Content Delivery Network (CDN) service.
The Basic CDN service caches static content in servers located around the globe and performs some content minification, speeding up delivery of your site and improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
We’re going full steam ahead launching new features for Everleap. We just launched the results of sprint #8 on Monday. This sprint included several interesting and useful features, here’s the list:
- Added the ability to open an account without assigning it a domain name
- Added a tool to allow you to securely set the connection string and appSettings from Control Panel
- Added scheduled task
- Added new SiteLock TrueShield product
In the old days, when there was an update, you felt like you just got a brand new gadget. Fresh, new, cool stuff to play with. These days, the cadence of updates is so fast, you can’t expect open the box and and find a drone every single time.
MVC 5.2, WebAPI 2.2, and Web Pages 3.2 have been updated. You can check MSDN for the details, but other than some improvements to attribute routing, there isn’t anything to plan a celebration for.