So at Monochrome we’re loving Mosso Cloud Servers and the flexibility they offer. Mosso Cloud Servers are the outcome of Mosso purchasing Slicehost, in fact the reverse DNS for my Cloud Server shows as Slicehost.net.

One thing to watch out for (and something that I imagine will get ironed out shortly) are the price differentials between the two sites. The prices on Slicehost.net INCLUDE a bandwidth allocation depending on the package you choose where as the prices for Mosso Cloud Servers do not include bandwidth, with is charged at $0.22/GB out and $0.08 in. *BUT* overages on Slicehost are charged at a blanket $0.3/GB (from http://www.slicehost.com/questions/#buy-storage).

So comparing like for like;

Slicehost
512Mb, 20GB, 200GB = $38

Mosso CloudServers
512Mb, 20GB, 0GB = $21.90

So if say you used 200GB in and 10GB out you’d be charged $44.8 on top of $21.90 totalling, $66.70 a month so Mosso Cloud Servers actually cost more than SliceHost but in the long run Slicehost could end up costing you more if you go over the package allocation and you have to pay overages.  But there again if you use significantly less bandwidth than the packaged amount then Cloud Servers work out cheaper because you pay for what you’re using.

Just food for though…

UPDATE: Just had a word with some folks at Slicehost. They will continue to operate as a separate division of Rackspace. Slicehost slices are a different product than Mosso Cloud Servers and the reverse IP of the cloud servers will change in time.

Mosso (aka Rackspace) have at last launched their CloudServers (aka Slicehost) offering to the public.

Similar to Amazon EC2 various flavours of Linux are available which will cost from around $10pm (256Mb,10Gb) up to $690 (16Gb/620Gb) plus bandwidth costs at $0.22/GB out and $0.08/GB in. Like Amazon, instances are scalable on demand but unlike Amazon (and what I see as a significant benefit over Amazon) instance storage is persistent in that it persists across shutdowns, failures etc without having to perform any voodoo in setting up your virtual environment. Via their online management console you have DNS management which is hosted outside of your server as well as a recovery console if it all goes wrong and a js based ssh client.

Unlike Amazon though, you are charged if your instance is shutdown since they guarantee system resources, also each instance gets a public IP (none NAT) and a private IP for inter CloudServers transfers. There’s an article here which compares CloudServers to Amazon EC2 where you can read more about the differences and the fact that support costs don’t increase as your usage increases.

Oh and they have launched with an SLA too!

Yesterday when I got home I was shocked to find out that an order I placed with Next on Sunday night had been delivered – (fair play though, ordered Sunday night and delivered Monday) despite me selecting that I wanted the delivery next Saturday when I knew someone would be at home. This is now the second time this has happened from Next – what’s the point in being able to select a delivery day if that request is not honoured? – I guess I’m just lucky that the next door neighbours were in!!

And what’s with other companies that let you enter a ‘separate delivery address’ but then deliver it to the billing address? That happened to me this morning, ordered something, expecting it to be delivered to work and the door bell rang just as I was leaving this morning and a parcel handed to me.

Boo!

So here’s the current browser usage according to Stats Counter. It shows for the first time that a Firefox version has over taken an IE version, in particular Firefox 3 overtaking IE 6 with IE7 way out ahead at a pretty consistent 40% share.

The strange thing from this chart though is that the FF3 increase is exactly the inverse of the FF2 decrease which in itself is not strange as FF users seem to be quite loyal but no browser share has grown at the same rate that IE6 has declined (being that IE7 usage seems relatively flat) so if IE7 is constant, FF2 declining as FF3 increases at the same rate – then if IE6 is declining where are they going?

Google searches…

Java is Dead – 9990 results
PHP is Dead – 4430 results
Cobol is Dead – 996 results
ColdFusion is Dead – 683 results

:)

Let’s start with a recap on how ColdFusion is currently licensed. ColdFusion Standard – Per Physical CPU, a ‘license’ covers 2 physical CPUs. A license is required per Virtual Instance. ColdFusion Enterprise – as per standard but multiple Virtual Instances are permitted - ie can be installed into seperate Virtual Machines. So for example, a VMware server (dual quad core CPU – i.e. 8 cores) running two OS instances would require 2 ColdFusion Standard licenses or a single ColdFusion Enterprise license. Imagine I have a second VMware server and for whatever reason move one of my OS instances to it. ColdFusion Standard is licensed per virtual instance so I’d still comply with licensing but a ColdFusion Enterprise virtual instance is a little more vague. It’s now running on a new physical CPU so in theory it would require another Enterprise license – so I’d have to have enough CF Enterprise licenses to cover the number of VMware servers I have in my infrastructure. Granted, if I’m running a large VMware based infrastructure then I’ve obviously I’ve got deep pockets so what’s a few more bucks between friends. In a virtual world I never really know (or need to know how) many physical cores I’m sitting on – I just care how many virtual processors I’m running on – something that’s easily configured on VMware, Virtuozzo Containers *AND* Amazon EC2 (by instance type). Here’s a shocking suggestion - What if ColdFusion was changed to/add per core licensing? I’d now be free to move my ColdFusion Enterprise instance between multiple physical servers and still comply with licensing – the only down side being that if I want to spin up new instances there’s a cost attached… But what if this new ‘ColdFusion Virtual Edition’ was *REQUIRED* for Virtual installations of ColdFusion whilst still maintaining Standard/Enterprise for none Virtual Environments. This way you’d still be able to run multiple CF Enterprise instances on a physical server but not for example setup a VMware server for the purposes of hosting and licensing CF Enterprise and then installing it across the number of virtual instances you can fit on the server. Hypothetically, ‘ColdFusion Virtual Edition’ would be licensed per instance core, based on the Enterprise edition but limited to 1 (maybe 2) CF Instance per ‘virtual OS instance’ akin to how IBM license their products – it would be attractively priced too, perhaps even available as a ‘leased model’ similar to many software providers current licensing programs for hosting providers, e.g. Microsoft SPLA, Parallels Leasing (Plesk, Virtuozzo etc). Leasing has numerous advantages both from a business point of view and financial point of view. Bought licenses end up as a capital expenditure whilst ‘leased’ licenses would be an operating cost. This would be a bonus for hosting providers rather than having to bear the upfront cost of ColdFusion and I think would be embraced by hosting companies providing a cost effective way for hosting providers to offer ColdFusion. Here’s another idea, Virtuozzo (as used by majority of hosting companies to offer ‘semi-dedicated’ servers) is available via leasing but licensed (and restricted) by the number of OS instances you can create per hardware node. You can however still buy a boxed copy which gives you unlimited OS instances. So what if ColdFusion Enterprise was available as a ‘leased’ option but available in instance counts, e.g. 1 Instance, 3 Instances, 5 instances, 10 instances etc. In Virtuozzo keys are added via the license manager which validate themselves every 3 months to make sure they are still valid/none pirated/you’re still paying etc – it’s a little different with Virtuozzo here as licenses are applied to the base Virtuozzo installation and limit the number of OS containers you can create but potentially with CF it would be per CF installation in each virtual OS instance and you’d have to ‘activate’ ColdFusion per instance in accordance with your purchased instance count (aka Microsoft Volume Licensing) – this model could then be adapted removing the physical server factor to be purely per CF installed instance so then you’re free to move the OS instance, complete with ColdFusion between physical servers. If ColdFusion Enterprise is really ‘Enterprise’ then people won’t mind paying for it under a licensing model that they may already be used to complying with for existing Enterprise software, whilst allowing them flexibility in their infrastructures.

On the way into work this morning I was thinking about a blog post I’m working on suggesting some ideas on how to utilise and more importantly Adobe could license ColdFusion in the cloud and what should arrive in my inbox was an email from Amazon announcing that

We are excited to announce that IBM and Amazon Web Services have teamed up to provide you with the ability to build and run a range of IBM applications using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) service. This relationship will enable you to bring your own IBM licenses to Amazon EC2, utilize IBM's "Development" AMIs, or leverage the "Production" Amazon EC2 running IBM service. The initial list of IBM environments that will be available includes: IBM DB2, IBM Informix, WebSphere sMash, IBM Lotus Web Content Management, and IBM WebSphere Portal Server.

Now this stole my thunder – as this was one on my propositions that Adobe should consider for ColdFusion. What if Adobe were to follow suit and team up with Amazon to Amazon offer prebuilt, licensed ColdFusion AMIs that we pay for what we use giving us the ability to spin up new instances and not have to worry if I’ve got enough licenses to cover it.

Interestingly, IBM license based on the number of virtual cores, this applies to all IBM software so the same licensing model can be used in the data centre and in a virtual (cloud) world – this is where ColdFusion differs as it’s per physical CPU, maybe it’s time to change to per core licensing or at least introduce a per core license (priced correctly of course) and this is the license model required for ‘cloud computing’. I never liked the idea of per core licensing but now with the shift to a more virtual world then it seems like the only option. With the IBM model you may already have you own licenses and there will be a way to bring your existing licenses with you, so I imagine they will have different pricing if you want to ‘pay per use’ their licenses or use your existing licenses.

NOTE: It seems then whenever we’re talking about ColdFusion in the cloud we always end up talking about EC2 – I’m aware there are other offerings coming to the market but at the moment EC2 does seem to be the flavour of the month.

Ray has a great intro post to jQuery form validation – whether or not he’s going to cover the ‘remote’ attribute in a later blog posting I don’t know – sorry Ray if i steal your thunder. But I make use of the ‘remote’ attribute all the time so I thought I'd share it with you. Basically you define your validation rules as; [sourcecode language='javascript'] rules: { password: { required: true, minlength: 5 }, password2: { required: true, minlength: 5, equalTo: "#password" }, emailaddress: { required:true, email: true, remote: "/ajaxendpoints/checkemail.cfm" }, firstname: { required:true }, lastname: { required:true } }, [/sourcecode] Notice on the emailaddress rule the remote attribute and a url, so now when you submit the form or loose focus (depending on your setup) the remote URL is hit passing in the value of the field to which it’s expecting a JSON TRUE/FALSE in return so you can use this for things like checking the email address isn't already registered, usernames etc. You can then customise the message displayed in the event event of a remote validation fail; [sourcecode language='javascript'] messages: { emailaddress: { required: 'This field is required', email: 'Enter a valid email address', remote: 'Email address already registered' } }, [/sourcecode] Neat huh?

I took part in the discussion in the latest UK CFUG podcast titled ‘Fluffy Clouds’, we had a fairly long open chat before recording the podcast involving the audience and discussing ‘Cloud Computing’, virtualisation and surrounding services.

I’m not going to spoil your listening of the podcast but I’m going to work on a series of follow up blog entries (so @markdrew take your time editing the podcast) that I’ll release once the podcast is out there as I feel I still have a number of points to get across and perhaps the odd one or two clarifications to make.

Yesterday Google announced a new beta version of it’s sync tools using Microsoft’s ActiveSync technology allowing phones to sync contacts and calenders using push technology to Google Apps/Gmail, much like how the G1 operates – email however still has to use an IMAP connection. Immediately I ran into the problem of already having an existing ActiveSync connection to my work server so can’t make use of the new service from Google but if you don’t then it’s worth checking out rather than having to use third party tools like Spanning Sync to grab your calendar/contacts from Google.

More info at http://www.google.com/mobile/default/sync.html