As we announced yesterday, ElasticHosts has partnered with CohesiveFT to offer thousands of pre-built Elastic Server images.

We and our customers are very excited that they can now get going even faster by automatically building an Elastic Server with all the software that they need pre-installed.

“Installing and configuring software components and operating systems on virtual servers from scratch is extremely time consuming and expensive,” said Richard Davies, Founder and CEO of ElasticHosts. “CohesiveFT’s Elastic Server automates this process allowing our users to concentrate on the benefits of our highly scalable, flexible, and cost effective KVM-based UK cloud. The combination of ElasticHosts and Elastic Server is a fast track to realizing returns from cloud computing — ElasticHosts customers can immediately deploy well over five thousand custom server images.”

“Configuring a server has always been time-consuming and complex.” said Sujay Jayaram, CEO of WeddingPath. “We have been a satisfied customer of the ElasticHosts team for almost 10 years and are very excited by the scalability, flexibility and ease of use that the ElasticHosts cloud offers. CohesiveFT’s pre-built Elastic Server images can get us up and running on this platform quickly.”

This video shows just how easy it is:

Get your Elastic Server up in the ElasticHosts cloud today with our free trial!

CohesiveFT Adds ElasticHosts as a cloud deployment option to its Elastic Server® Platform

Custom virtual servers can be dynamically assembled and delivered to ElasticHosts cloud infrastructure

CHICAGO, IL and LONDON, UK — January 22, 2009 — CohesiveFT (http://www.cohesiveft.com), the leader in automated software assembly, today announced it has partnered with ElasticHosts Ltd. (http://www.elastichosts.com), the second European cloud infrastructure and the world’s first public cloud based upon KVM (the native Linux virtualization platform). As a result, users are now able to deploy virtual servers to the ElasticHosts cloud infrastructure via CohesiveFT’s Elastic Server on-demand service. Elastic Server is an automated “factory” that allows IT professionals to assemble, deploy, and manage virtual servers using a simple point-and-click interface. Beginning today, customers can assemble custom Enterprise-class servers for deployment to ElasticHosts’ European cloud computing infrastructure. Free trials are available of both ElasticHosts cloud infrastructure and CohesiveFT’s Elastic Server factory, allowing customers to test drive the joint solution.

“Installing and configuring software components and operating systems on virtual servers from scratch is extremely time consuming and expensive,” said Richard Davies, Founder and CEO of ElasticHosts. “CohesiveFT’s Elastic Server automates this process allowing our users to concentrate on the benefits of our highly scalable, flexible, and cost effective KVM-based UK cloud. The combination of ElasticHosts and Elastic Server is a fast track to realizing returns from cloud computing — ElasticHosts customers can immediately deploy well over five thousand custom server images.”

“Configuring a server has always been time-consuming and complex.” said Sujay Jayaram, CEO of WeddingPath. “We have been a satisfied customer of the ElasticHosts team for almost 10 years and are very excited by the scalability, flexibility and ease of use that the ElasticHosts cloud offers. CohesiveFT’s pre-built Elastic Server images can get us up and running on this platform quickly.”

The Elastic Server platform is a complement to virtualization and cloud offerings. Users assemble custom servers by choosing from a library of popular components. Once assembled, these custom application stacks can be configured to a variety of virtualization and cloud-ready formats, downloaded and deployed in real-time. There are more than two thousand users of the service who have assembled more than five thousand Elastic Server images to the market for public and private use. The addition of ElasticHosts highlights CohesiveFT’s platform momentum following recently introduced support for Virtual Iron, Amazon EC2 in Europe, and the Ubuntu operating system.

“We are very excited to add the ElasticHosts cloud deployment option to our on-demand service,” said Patrick Kerpan, CTO at CohesiveFT. “Users can now deploy their custom, dynamically assembled Elastic Servers to multiple clouds in multiple geographic regions setting the foundation for initiatives requiring cloud failover and cross-cloud security.”

Custom virtual servers for the ElasticHosts cloud are available now via Elastic Server (http://elasticserver.com).

About ElasticHosts

ElasticHosts is the second European cloud infrastructure provider and the world’s first public cloud based upon KVM, the native Linux virtualization platform. The company provides flexible server capacity in the UK for scalable web hosting and on-demand burst computing such as batch processing, dev/test, disaster recovery and cloud bursting. ElasticHosts offers competitive pricing for both subscription and burst use, fast direct links to the UK/EU internet, data storage within EU jurisdiction and outstanding performance for any PC operating system with fully flexible sizing. For more information, visit www.elastichosts.com or e-mail sales@elastichosts.com.

About CohesiveFT

CohesiveFT enables customers to dynamically define and deploy servers for virtual environments and clouds. The company’s flagship platform, Elastic Server®, is a web-based “factory” for creating, deploying and managing custom, multi-sourced assemblies comprised of horizontal, open source and third-party software components. Elastic Servers can be saved as templates, updated, augmented, or redeployed in minutes. In addition to the self-service platform, the company offers packaged solutions for custom cloud implementations. CohesiveFT was founded in 2006 by principals with deep backgrounds in Enterprise IT, Commercial ISVs and multiple successful startups. CohesiveFT was listed among InformationWeek’s “top cloud computing startups you should know.” The company has offices in London, Chicago and Palo Alto. For more information, visit www.cohesiveft.com or www.cohesiveft.com/elastichosts.

About WeddingPath

WeddingPath is a UK based community for brides and grooms planning their weddings. The company’s USP is their Free Wedding Website concept — they are essentially a small technology company. Working with trusted, reliable and friendly backup is something has made everyone’s lives easier in running this community site. For more information, visit www.weddingpath.co.uk.

Elastic Server is a registered trademark of CohesiveFT. ElasticHosts is a trademark of ElasticHosts Ltd. WeddingPath is a trademark of SingleBass Ltd. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.

Contact:

Ryan Koop, CohesiveFT, marketing(at)cohesiveft.com, +1 312 924 1055

Richard Davies, ElasticHosts, sales@elastichosts.com, +44 845 686 8642

In the first two weeks of 2009 we have released a wave of new features to our users. Here’s a quick summary:

• Pre-installed system images: We now offer pre-installed system images to get you started as quickly as possible. Of course, you can still install from our wide range of install CDs (or upload your own) for ultimate control over your configuration.

• Windows 7 support: Windows 7 Beta was released on Friday. We are pleased to report that it installs and runs perfectly on our infrastructure.

• JSON support for API: Our HTTP API now offers input and output in JSON. This means that you can easily control our cloud from your Javascript or Ajax web applications.

• Drive upload tool: Our drive upload tool for Unix gives you another option to transfer your custom server images onto our cloud, in addition to FTP upload or using our web upload form.

• kvm-82: Our virtualization infrastructure now runs kvm-82, bringing you the latest kvm stability and performance improvements.

• Management console improvements: We have improved our management console, making it even easier to control your servers and drives.

See for yourself with our free trial, which we have now extended to 24 hours.

ElasticHosts recently released our HTTP API. In the course of system integration for our products, evaluating our competitors’ APIs and designing our own, we came to a clear view on what makes a great HTTP or web services API. Like many things in computing, it comes down to KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid — simple for the users, that is!

Simple syntax

Simple syntax means making it easy for any user with a standard tool to call the API. If you can’t call the API with curl from a single line of shell then your API is not good enough. This rules out many of today’s cumbersome XML-RPC and SOAP APIs, although you will want XML as an option for users who are using XML-friendly languages.

We believe in:

• Choice of syntax: Different users will find different syntax most natural. At the unix shell, space-deliminated text rules. From Javascript, you’ll want JSON. From Java, you may want XML. Some tools parse x-www-form-encoded data nicely. A great HTTP API makes every command available with data in all of these formats for all of these users, specified with either different URLs or MIME content types. (OK, we admit that we’ve only released text/plain ourselves so far, but the rest are coming very soon!).

• Don’t reinvent the wheel: Smart people designed the internet. There are good existing mechanisms for security (e.g. SSL/TLS), authentication (e.g. HTTP auth), error codes (e.g. HTTP status codes), etc. Use them, and don’t invent your own, unlike one UK payment gateway who invented a simple XOR encryption which is vulnerable to a known plaintext attack and didn’t fix it when we pointed this out!

Simple semantics

Simple semantics means having a small number of powerful, orthogonal commands. If your API needs a 300 page document to explain it then something is wrong. Equally, your users shouldn’t even be aware of the artificial abstractions and data structures which you invented inside your software.

We believe in:

• Few powerful orthogonal commands: For your API users, each call adds overhead, both in code and response times. Produce a few powerful calls which do the work of many smaller ones. In our case, our API has a single call for “server create”, where this would take many calls with some of our competitors’ APIs: starting the server, associating a static IP, associating persistent storage, etc.

• No artificial abstractions: API users don’t care how you wrote your software, and shouldn’t have to know or change their calls when you change your design. Try as hard as you can to hide your internal structures from the user unless it’s absolutely necessary to expose them. In our case, a cloud infrastructure platform provides virtual server hardware, and we let users configure this as they would real hardware, choosing an amount of RAM, specifying which hard disk is on which IDE bus, etc. We don’t invent “instance types” and we deal with mapping the well-known hardware descriptions to how the virtualization platform sees them.

• Immediate response where possible: All of our API commands are synchronous, and they usually complete within seconds of all input data arriving. If we can do this for a cloud infrastructure platform, then surely you can for your application?

Happy New Year, and may your 2009 APIs be good ones!