14 August 2011
For a long time it was quiet around 30loops. We were really busy shaping our hosting platform and just plainly didn't find time to write about it. But now we reached a stage where we have a lot more clear. We are currently finalizing the technology and believe that we can soon move into a beta phase.
Well, I think it will be very exciting, not only for us but also for you. From the point where we started a couple of months ago, we went through several iterations. We tried different approaches and technologies, and if we didn't like it, we threw them plainly out. In this post I want to summarise the feature set we target and describe a bit the possibilities we have for further development.
The 30loops platform is centered around a 'loose' definition of a service. In our speak everything we offer for you is a service. You can create a specific service or connect several of them into a bigger service. When we started to brainstorm a few months ago we wanted to provide hosting for web applications. This is definitely still our main focus. But the way we build our management tools and the backend software a lot is possible and can be imagined, eg: mailservices and code repositories. Also we started off with a focus on python. This is still the case, but adding support for php or ruby as development environments is possible and not very difficult. For our initial release we go for python, since we use it ourselves and we love it. But don't be surprised if we suddenly start to offer also ruby or java hosting.
In the beginning we plan to implement the following services:
But if the demand is there, we can support more services, eg: MySQL.
We know that not only applications grow and scale, but also organizations behind it. We took this into account and offer complex access control to the services. This means you can create groups of users and limit permissions of services as you see fit. Like this your organization can grow with your applications and you can also hand out limited access to 3rd parties if needed.
We are building our platform on top of our own hardware. This gives us a lot of freedom and possibilities. Currently our servers are located in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. This places us very close to the AMS-IX (http://www.ams-ix.net/), a major internet exchange point on continental europe. But we know that latency can make all the difference when its about measuring the performance of your application. Therefore we built 30loops in a way that you can easily scale your application to different cloud providers and different continents. You want to use Rackspace or Amazon instead of our own hardware, no problem. You want your application to have instances running in Europe and the USA, just split the backends of your app among these continents and use some kind of GeoDNS to filter your incoming requests by origin.
Communication with 30loops, in any aspect, is happening using HTTP requests. The webinterface itself is just a fancy wrapper to this REST interface. This makes it possible for you to integrate the management of your application into any management tool you use or develop. But it also gives you the possibility to use any tool you feel more comfortable with whenever you want to manage your services. This can be a webinterface, our command line tool or just simply curl. What about iPython? No problem, just install the libthirty module and you have the full API at your disposal. This loose service model also enables us to provide the same interface to any kind of resource we provide. This includes SQL databases or NoSQL and caching services.
We try to prevent any possible security issue before they happen. Of course we are aware that security is a process and never perfect, but we try to prevent many possible threats already early on. We implement a strong policy of isolation. Each application backend runs in its own jail and traffic in and out of each jail is filtered at its edge. The jails are hardened using standard several security procedures.
Well, in the meantime we continue to work on the integration of the different components to iron out bugs. We gonna start very soon with a first alpha test where we have a limited group of testers trying to crash the platform. Once we survive this we start to go beta. If you signed up for a beta test, then you will get an email to invite you for that phase. We can't say anything about our price scheme yet. Again, until now we were more interested in a good and solid developer platform that we just didn't think about prices yet.
I hope by now you are as excited about it as we are. At least I can't wait till we start to roll out. So prepare for some rocking python hosting coming this fall (you can imagine the blockbuster music in the background yourself).