Help Snapt Launch!From the ground up we’ve built Snapt to be exactly what we’d want as HAProxy and Squid users ourselves – and now we’re asking you how much to charge for it!
If you have 2 minutes to fill in our <10 question survey it will help us to gauge what the community is willing to pay for Snapt as well as a few other questions.
Tags: launch, snapt, survey
Posted in Framework, HAProxy, Squid
HAProxy Available Next MonthBefore the end of next month we hope to release Snapt HAProxy! We’ve come a long way since we originally started developing our professional front-end to the load balancer, and we’re excited to show it off.
Remember to join our launch email list to be offered a discount when it’s available!
SnaptHA ACL ManagementBased on feedback received from a few of our Beta testers, we’ve been able to identify the features needed for SnaptHA to move forward. One of the biggest features is advanced ACL management.
An ACL is a rule used to determine what action is required based on the incoming request. They can also be used to monitor backends or block the request all together. Having said that, the combination of conditionals within the ACL can become tricky and a fool proof method of managing them is required to get the most out of your HAProxy server.
SnaptHA treats ACLs as objects; you create an ACL and attach it to any number of required frontends. HAProxy ships with a set of predefined ACL’s that can be used such as HTTP, FALSE, TRUE, METH_CONNECT and many more depending on your version of HAProxy. These predefined ACLs are also available to be used in the same fashion as your own custom one.
Creating the ACL is made simple by a step based wizard. You can opt to either create your own ACL or select from a list of ACL templates – our version of predefined ACLs that ship with SnaptHA.
Once an ACL has been created it can be attached to your configured frontends along with the actions to be taken on that ACL.
It’s as simple as that, and the good news is that SnaptHA is able to import most existing ACLs making the integration process that much easier!
More Beta Invites Go OutAn additional batch of closed beta invitations have just been sent out. We’re getting closer and closer to release date, and are very excited! If you’d like to be a part of the closed beta, make sure to subscribe to the release notification list.
Handy Tools: Snapt CronThe Snapt framework comes with an advanced cron handler, meaning on installation all you need to do is add that the cronjob handler will run every minute in cron and we’ll decide when to run our reporting, logging, and other tasks automatically.
To do that, we had to write a more sophisticated cron – with abilities like “once off” or temporary tasks, that after running successfully are removed. We’ve also introduced load limits and retries – so a task can be set to only run when the unit is not heavily loaded.
Having done all of that, we thought why not give the user that ability; for free. And so was born a new, free plugin named “Snapt Cron”. Below is a screenshot of adding an example cron entry where it will reboot at night, and remove the cron task.
Snapt Cron is available with any Snapt Framework installation (e.g. Snapt HAProxy, Snapt Squid). If you would like to be notified when the product is available officially, please use our release notification list.
Diagnosing Problems Made EasySnapt is a powerful user interface to powerful open source software, but, things go wrong with any software and when it does one of the primary functions of Snapt is to help diagnose and repair the problems. Whether checking its own setup, or making sure your critical load balancer is up and running Snapt will automatically alert you of problems, and comes with a full framework status check to help you diagnose any issues, as shown below.
We aim to make open source as easy and as powerful as it can be, while keeping the complexities of managing it and supporting it away from you, while providing corporate level support.
Tags: diagnose, Framework, problem, solving, status, system
Posted in Framework
Snapt Backup, Free with SnaptHaving a hardware failure in a high availability environment is not an option, and finding a solution to backup whatever you are using can be difficult. Restoring those backups can be even harder.
Snapt comes free with an optional backup plugin that will save any Snapt configurations, and the configurations for any Snapt modules you have. In the screenshot below, you can see we automatically take a daily backup of our Snapt installation as well as our HAProxy config file.
The files can be stored on disk or emailed, and the configuration can be restored automatically after a failure by the Snapt Backup plugin. This is available free to all Snapt clients, as one of the optional plugins.
First External Beta Tester To Go LiveWe’re happy to announce that next week we will be giving our first external beta tester a full version of the Snapt Framework and Snapt HAProxy products. Soon after that we will ramp up our beta testing to other interested parties; if you want to be a part of it please feel free to contact us through the website and we will get back to you. Alternatively, you can subscribe to our release list to be notified when it is publicly available!
We will also be offering our beta testers initial discounts on the product. Currently, only Snapt HAProxy is available for testing and only for Ubuntu, Fedora/Redhat and FreeBSD.
HAProxy Live GraphingIt is critical to be able to see exactly what is going on at any point in time in a high availability environment, and one of the ways Snapt presents this data for HAProxy is with live graphing. This allows you to sit back and watch the throughput and the sessions your HAProxy groups are doing – as it happens!
Above is an example of the live traffic to our group “HTTP-Farm”. When monitoring or diagnosing a problem a live graph can be worth a thousand lines of logfile.
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February 15th, 2010Thanks for all your support!