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.
Before 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!
The 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.
Snapt 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.
Having 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.
Snapt has been built from the ground up with translation in mind, and we intend to support many languages. Naturally, our first release only officially supports English but already comes with German menus as a beta example.
Selecting a language is very easy as you can see above, and is done in the initial Snapt Setup. Any strings that are available in the language you choose are then displayed using that language, and any missing strings are displayed in English, as you can see below.
Translations will be added as we can justify them based on our users, and will be free with Snapt. Obviously we will also accept any user submissions and roll them out automatically with updates of the framework.
One of the features packaged in the Snapt Framework is the “Interception Manager”. This provides plugins to the framework such as Snapt Squid or Snapt HAProxy to transparently intercept traffic.
In the Squid example, it makes it easy to pick up HTTP (port 80) traffic and cache it without interfering with user configuration, or with HAProxy you can roll out load balancing without changing IP addresses and the like. Typically, this can get confusing and complicated – so we introduced an interception manager.
Each plugin is assigned a “space” in which it can operate to intercept traffic. Each space can have subspaces. For example, each HAProxy group effectively has its own space which can have any number of ports or IP addresses to intercept traffic on and redirect it to HAProxy.
The interception manager automatically integrates with your firewall (currently it supports PF or IPTables) and intercepts the data. You can disable and enable interception spaces without losing their configuration – allowing maintenance without downtime, and you can disable the entire system without losing your setup.
You can see an example of some live HAProxy groups intercepting data below
One of the features available in the Snapt Framework (included with any Snapt product) is the ability to send alerts via twitter – aka to tweet alerts. This is an interesting concept, and actually a great way (for internet crowds) to keep people up to date with any status updates.
Twitter allows you to set your account to “private” which means only followers that you approve can see your status updates. This lets you and your staff follow a single twitter account which all of your Snapt installations will send alerts to. We Tweet with the installation name and 160 characters of description, for example this is a tweet that recently went out to all of our followers:
You can change the installation name of the host (currently Snapt UI) to anything you like – meaning it’s simple to view various installations on one account. Of course this can be used in conjunction with email alerts and the like, but it’s an interesting and effective way to keep a team in the loop and to have a single place for alerts.
With work on the Snapt Framework moving along, focus is being shifted toward the completion of our two launch modules; HAProxy and Squid.
Some of the features to look forward to in Snapt Squid have already been discussed and work on plugins has started. The plugins aim to bring functionality that might not be common to all installations without adding unnecessary bloat to the Snapt Squid Module. Examples include authentication, WCCP, advanced peering and more.
The Snapt HAProxy module is a feature packed front end to the HA Proxy Load Balancer. Among many other features, it includes advanced reporting, simple yet powerful control over the config file as well as status alerts. Scheduled for release with the launch of the Snapt Framework, this will give HA Proxy the frontend needed to position itself as a competitive Open Source load balancer.
We’re excited for 2010 and for the great feedback we have received so far. Remember, by subscribing to the release list you will be the first to know when Snapt is officially launched.
Snapt Turbo is an idea which was originally (to our knowledge) started by the WordPress community. “Turbo” is the idea of using Google Gears to accelerate a website as opposed to storing an offline copy. With Snapt turbo and Google Gears you can store all of the CSS, images and javascript on your local machine meaning even over a latent or slow link your Snapt experience is Turbo-Charged!
When you first go to Turbo, you’ll notice it will either tell you to install Gears as in the screenshot below (and guide you through it) or if you have installed Gears it will skip to step 2.
Once you have it running, you’ll be presented with a screen allowing you to “begin the download of files”. Once you start that process you will see a progress bar guiding your download. Depending on your connection to the framework it may take a while! If you are on a LAN connection it should be over in less than a minute. A preview of what to expect is below.
After the download you can refresh the page and you should see a confirmation message letting you know everything is fine (as seen below). Now your experience is Turbo-Charged!
This feature is included free with all Snapt Frameworks, and includes the acceleration of any Snaptin modules.
You are currently browsing the archives for the Framework category.
