This new CP is unlike anything myself or anybody else has done before  .. it’s a new dynamic experience (not the boring, static content of yesterday), and it will blow users (and competition) away.

I am extremely excited about it, and with the Public Beta coming next week, I cannot yet say more about it (it’s ben hard enough to keep my mouth shut until now), but sometime next week I will post some screenines when we release it

We had done some tests on the VPS Cloud self healing measure by shutting down a Hypervisor’s services, and always, the VPS nodes residing there, would automatically boot up on a different one in the Cloud … always below 40 seconds (yes, 40 seconds)… but we decided that was no fun, it was time to go to the datacenter and pull some cables … yes .. I love my job

So there we are, myself and Paul (head of IT @ UK2), we located the Hypervisor we wanted to test, enabled monitors for the main NIC and the VPS’s IP’s … all systems go, the anticipation of success in the air, our palms sweating, giggling like schoolgirls .. and “click” … we pulled the cable …

We then started counting till the VPS’s where back up elsewhere in the VPS Cloud … 1,2,3 … 40 .. ok, anytime now … 60 … 90 ? .. wait a second … what is wrong here ?

3 minutes later, we looked at each other in horror … the unthinkable happened … the VPS Cloud self healing feature .. one of the cornerstones of our offer .. had failed !!!!

Luckily this is still our beta testing .. but what had happen ? it always worked when we turned the services down, why did it fail when we pulled a NIC cable instead ?, what was the difference ? .. and so it began todays “must know” task.

We started by looking at the logs, nothing strange there, actually, nothing there at all for the past few minutes .. thats when it hit .. there was indeed NOTHING in there, the logs show no downtime had ben detected for a Hypervisor.. we returned to the Admin CP, and sure enough .. it still detected that system as being up .. but how ?

Well, as so often is the case, you look into a few hundred lines of code, until you decide to instead look at the obvious … could the internal monitor daemon failed … and if it failed .. why where we not notified ? .. wait .. what monitors the monitor .. ? ..

Simple schoolboy error, we had all sorts of monitors, bells and whistles .. if anything in the VPS Cloud fails, it gets detected within 5 seconds or less .. a true example of monitoring excellence … but what we forgot was .. what if the monitor fails ?

This brings me back to the post topic, the importance of failure .. there was no difference on our test .. pulling the cable or shutting down the services all lead to the VPS Cloud monitor to kick in and do it’s job … it was just a coincidence that this time the monitor daemon had hang, had the failure not happen, this simply oversight could have cause trouble later on, so yes, failure is good .. as long as it happens during beta testing .

So we rewrote some of the daemon to be more robust (we found what caused it to fail and fixed it) and implemented extra monitoring procedures that now we monitor the monitor too

This emphasizes the importance of beta testing and fault simulation, so often we see companies go live with untested ground breaking products and have a miserable first quarter or two of constant failure and bug fixing, many times driving them to closure .. if not properly tested, it’ the small things that will get you in the end.

So as such, time has come to start a blog (located at http://vps.net/blog), to keep everybody informed on the latest and greatest features we are working on for the VPS Cloud, as such, during the upcoming days and weeks, we will post details on the new website, the Cloud features, the user interface, and much more.

VPS.net is a new brand by that great hosting outfit that I work for (yeah, we are great, get used to it), the UK2 Group, owners of 10TB, UK2.NET, Midphase, etc ..

So keep checking that blog page every day (or even several times a day, things are moving fast), we expect to release VPS.net LIVE on January 31st, but will be looking for beta testers in the upcoming few weeks

So the first order of business today was to nick Ditlev’s lava lamp (we have a few aroudn the office, the motion of the liquid resembles our UK2 blob logo), plus I properly tied it up the desk with the new 3008WFP I got from Dell.

This is how it looks now, perfect

Apple MacBook Pro
Wacom A5 SE Wide Tablet
Dell 3008WFP 30″ LCD
Logitech Mac Wireless combo

Here is the news report by “thewhir“

UK-2 Names Senior Usability Officer

By Justin Lee, theWHIR.com

October 15, 2008 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — UK Internet solutions provider UK-2 Group (www.uk2.net) announced on Monday it has named Carlos Rego in the company’s newly created role of Senior Usability Officer.

In the press release, the specifications of the position and respective duties are somewhat vague, simply stating that “Rego will be responsible for redefining the web hosting end user experience.”

Rego is the former managing director of Positive Software automation division of Comodo, which was acquired by Parallels.

“In an industry where many players are as indistinct as the nodes of the Internet, Carlos is one of those rare few who can point out actual achievements,” says Ditlev Bredahl, managing director of the UK-2Group. “His work at Positive Software elevated H-Sphere from obscurity to one of the top control panels in the industry. He has demonstrably built up several companies and we look forward to a similar contribution here at UK-2 Group.”

Rego was also one of the pioneers of redundant and split web services, which are now industry standards, and implemented software capable of cloud/grid based environments, years before it became a hot topic.

Occasionally in the hosting industry, companies will create an entirely new position, complete with its own unique job title, to fulfill a needed role.

Some companies will create these new positions as a quick fix solution to consolidating several duties into one role, while others develop the new roles to focus and prioritize key activities.

Mosso, Rackspace Hosting’s cloud computing division, is another company that recently created a new role, naming 20-year technology veteran Bruce Runyan the company’s chief uptime officer.

UK-2 Group provides domain name registration and web hosting services to a wide customer base through its several hosting brands, which include UK2.net, US2.net, Midphase.com and Resell.biz.

Earlier this month, the company announced it recently acquired Web host Dotable, bringing with it over 10,000 domains.

Not too shabby

I was pleasantly made aware that we where celebrating the 10 year anniversary of the company today !!(10/10… How appropriate, gotta love marketing)

Anyway.. The celebrations started at 1:00PM at the office and after a few hours of “work” in the afternoon they proceeded the night away.

It was a nice way to end my first week here, everybody has been great and very accomodating, toping it off with free beer today, just made it one of my best weeks at a job yet.

Here is a pic of the anniversary cake.