2010-07-26

Support for AWS High Performance Clusters (HPC)

Amazon Web Services has just released a new instance type, the Cluster Compute Instance (CCI).  The new instance type is called a Cluster Compute Quadruple Extra Large (cc1.4xlarge).  Applications that are particularly demanding with respect to required compute power and low latency networking between nodes in a cluster should consider using the new instance type for High Performance Clusters.  The basic specifications for CCI are as follows:

• CPU - 2 x Intel Xeon X5570
• Platform - 64 bit
• Memory - 23GB
• Network - 10 Gigabit Ethernet

Cluster Compute Instances require the use of a HVM-based (Hardware Virtual Machine) Amazon EBS-based machine image.  Other EC2 instance types use a PVM-based (Paravirtual Machine) machine image.  HVM-based CCI's require new images and kernels.  Although we will release one beta image in the US-East region (Centos 5.4 x64) you can RightScale enable a HVM-based image from Amazon.

See Cluster Compute Instances and AWS EC2 (Instance Types section) for more information.

Support for EULAs

You now have the ability to create a EULA (End User License Agreement) and attach it to a ServerTemplate when you publish it.  You cannot attach a EULA to a previously published ServerTemplate, please publish a new revision of the ServerTemplate with the desired EULA instead.  Only ServerTemplates are supported currently.  (That is, you cannot attach EULAs to other RightScale Components such as RightScripts or Macros.)   You can attach 0, 1 or more EULAs to a ServerTemplate during the publishing process.  See EULAs for more information.   (bl-10667)

Port Level Permissions

You now have control over port-level permissions when specifying a group in Security Group ingress rules.  Previously, RightScale only supported the ability to add a group to another Security Group where instances in the added group have full access across all ports.  See Security Groups.(or-6814w)

Logging Support for CloudFront Streaming Distributions

You can now enable Streaming CloudFront Distributions for logging.  Previously, logging was only supported on Basic CloudFront Distributions.  Similar to basic CloudFront distributions, you specify a logging bucket and an optional logging prefix to enable and configure the new logging feature.  See Create a New CloudFront Distribution.  (gr-6928w)

QuickSearch Field

There is now a QuickSearch field in the upper left corner of the Dashboard which you can use to search nicknames of Deployments, RightScripts, ServerTemplates, Server Arrays, and Servers. The keyboard shortcut ctrl-s activates the QuickSearch. This feature is intended for quick navigation, not as a comprehensive search facility. We'd welcome feedback on how to improve this feature while keeping it simple, specially on how to improve the sort order of results.

Improvements to ISV Reports

Backend performance improvements were made to the reporting system used to generated ISV reports.  Three new columns of information have been added to the report including Cloud, Instance Platform, and Instance Nickname.   (bl-11216)

Improvements to the RightScale Alert System

The alert system has been rebuilt to ensure scalability while reducing complexity within the Dashboard UI.  (Note:  We have been very careful to maintain the same functionality as before, please notify us immediately if you see incorrect behavior with respect to Alerts and scaling.)

The new method uses dedicated machine tags called "voter tags".  Soon we will deprecate the old method of using Alert Escalations for getting Servers to vote to grow/shrink an array in order to simplify the setup, enhance the voting functionality, eliminate hidden semantics, and enhance scalability. The old method will continue to be fully supported for the time being. The new method uses the tags available on any Server to set special "voter tags".

Important!  To learn more about how to use tag-based alerts for autoscaling purposes, see the RightScale Alert System. Again, the legacy methodology still works and is fully documented here.  Please refer back to these Release Notes for a pointer to the new voting tag documentation.

RightScale API

The RightScale API has been enhanced to support the voting tags improvements to the RightScale Alert System.  The API remains backwards compatible, fully supporting the old methodology as well.  The following have been changed this release to support the Alert System enhancements:

• Create API calls on server_arrays and alert_specs
• Update API calls on server_arrays, alert_specs, and ec2_security_groups

 As usual, the new RightScale API rdoc reference information will include the changes, and should be live on the Support Portal the day after the release.

Improvements to the MultiCloud Marketplace

Several enhancements were made to the MultiCloud Marketplace to improve overall usability.

• Renamed the "View More" text links located at the bottom of component to be more function-specific (e.g. Most Popular, Recently Added) 
• The "What are x?" informational orange boxes will be hidden for users browsing the MultiCloud Marketplace in the context of the Dashboard
• Helpful tooltips were added for different user actions in the MultiCloud Marketplace (Import, Subscribe, Open in Dashboard, etc.)

(gr-10666)  

Terminate action button still appears for a terminated instance

Previously, when you went to the show page of a terminated instance, the terminate action button would still be shown even though the instance was successfully terminated.  This problem was fixed.