Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology » cloud http://zenofnptech.org Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Mon, 19 Sep 2011 18:24:48 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 The wonders of libcloud http://zenofnptech.org/2009/07/wonders-of-libcloud.html http://zenofnptech.org/2009/07/wonders-of-libcloud.html#comments Fri, 31 Jul 2009 04:52:05 +0000 Pearlbear http://www.zenofnptech.org/?p=540 Here at OpenIssue, we think a lot about the web. I mean, a LOT. And we’ve been thinking a lot about web hosting, and the varied flavors it comes in. We’re working to figure out what makes sense for us to use and implement, and what makes sense for us to recommend to our clients. A while ago, we decided, like many folks, virtual private servers were going to be the preferred hosting set up. Not that it’s right for all organizations – but for many who invest significant dollars into implementation of a website or CiviCRM, the advantages of a VPS will likely outweigh the higher monthly cost.

We started using Slicehost, which was incredibly easy to set up and use, and was acquired by Rackspace, which is considered the premium dedicated server hosting company. I then soon discovered a service called Cloudkick, which allowed us to monitor all of our slices and our clients slices in one dashboard. That was very cool.

It turns out that in the process of creating Cloudkick, the folks there came up with libcloud – a library that service providers could use to give developers access to the services needed by the servers – list, restart, create, destroy, etc. There are now a number of cloud hosting service providers, such as Rackspace cloud servers (used to be Mosso), Slicehost, and Amazon, that are beginning to support libcloud. Libcloud has become it’s own open source project, and is under active development.

Hopefully, this will provide a plethora of options for folks in terms of being able to monitor and manage the varied cloud servers they’ve got going. It certainly has already made our lives a lot easier.

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