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AWS Marketplace: False Positive Security Warning

It was recently brought to our attention that AWS Marketplace sent out a security warning direct to many of our AWS users. This occurred without any prior consultation with us, or verification that there was indeed an issue to warn about.

New Hub feature: Server snapshots

I usually get excited when adding new features to the TurnKey Hub. Recent excitement included server monitoring, reserved instances, domain management, and the Hub API.

I'm very excited about todays annoucement, not only is it awesomely useful, it's also technically cool!

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Mapping AWS data centers for fastest connection

Yes, that's 'fastest', not closest.

Background

A while back I published a blog post entitled Finding the closest data center using GeoIP and indexing, which described how we automatically determine the AWS regional data center to be used for storing encrypted server backups.

New Hub feature: Cloud server monitoring

Ladies and gentle geeks, I'm proud to announce we've just pushed out 100% free basic server monitoring to all TurnKey Hub accounts. This should make it easier to keep tabs on the health and performance of your cloud servers. Existing Hub users don't need to do anything to enjoy this new feature. It just works.

A better server dashboard

As you can see in the screenshot below, the server dashboard now includes thumbnail graphs of CPU utilization, disk IO and network traffic for the last hour:

Hub dashboard metric thumbnails

TurnKey Hub: Not just adding random features

I started writing a review for cloudtask as a comment on the announcement, but decided it would be better to address a topic that was raised by Jeremiah when we launched the Hub API:

Introducing CloudTask - a cloud batch execution tool

The cloud. Isn't that just a new name everyone on the latest hype bandwagon is slapping on the same old stuff? Yes. Or rather, at least the way some clueless marketing types are using it that is. With so much smoke you'd forgive the cynics for thinking there's no fire. But... there are a few genuinely interesting things an IT guy can do today that just weren't practical a few years back.

TurnKey 11.2, free micro instances, EBS backed cloud servers

TurnKey 11.2: micro instances, EBS support, built-in TurnKey DNS, security updates

We just updated the web site and the TurnKey Hub with the new TurnKey 11.2 maintenance release, which includes:

  1. TurnKey Hub support for micro instances, Amazon's free tier and cloud servers backed by persistent network-attached storage volumes (AKA EBS backed instances).
  2. Built-in support for TurnKey's new dynamic DNS service.
  3. The latest security updates.

TurnKey Domain management & Dynamic DNS

A while ago I was chatting with Liraz and said "wouldn't it be great if when launching a cloud server the Hub would perform some magic and assign the server a friendly name? I'm tired of remembering IP addresses, and logging into our DNS management console to setup records."

Then we thought, "lets make DNS easy, lets make it TurnKey". So we did...

No matter your use case, we got you covered:

Amazon FPS (flexible payments system) in a nutshell

A few weeks ago I looked into Amazon FPS (Flexible Payments Service), just to see what our options are for premium services like commercial support. You know, the stuff we can't give away even if we wanted to because their are real costs involved which we couldn't subsidize without going bankrupt.

Note that we're probably not going to be using FPS in the near term but I did research it exhaustively before I ruled it out (for now). While it's fresh in my mind here's the summary for the benefit of those who might be considering it as an option.

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