A very warm welcome to Ardyn Elisabeth Majere, our first US-based member of staff!
Someone many of you have already spoken to over email, Ardyn is our new overnight support manager in North America.
A computer lover from a young age, she’s been the local Tech Support for her family and friends for many years, helping with everything from galleries and blogs to fully-integrated CMS installation. She tells us she even managed to get her mother and sister-in-law comfortable using Ubuntu — no small feat!
Outside of her work with us, Ardyn is currently in the midst of a degree in psychology. She lives in Northern California with two cats, her partner and a multitude of over-full bookshelves!
Ardyn dabbles in photography, particularly photo manipulation, as well as doing sound editing for the audio books that her partner voices.
Following in the footsteps of Apache Libcloud, another open-source cloud library has added support for ElasticHosts.
We’re very pleased to report that the open-source jclouds Java cloud computing library now supports ElasticHosts and ElasticStack.
This is thanks to developer Adrian Cole, whom we’ve been working with to make this happen — see his official announcement.
You can now use the fully-featured and actively-developed jclouds library to access your ElasticHosts instances directly.
To introduce jclouds in the developers’ own words:
jclouds is an open source library that helps you get started in the cloud and reuse your java and clojure development skills. Our api allows you freedom to use portable abstractions or cloud-specific features.
Here’s how we help you get started:
- Simple interface Instead of creating new object types, we reuse concepts like maps so that the programming model is familiar. In this way, you can get started without dealing with REST-like apis or WS.
- Runtime portability We have plugins that allow you to operate in restricted environments like Google App Engine and Android.
- Deal with web complexity Network based computing introduces issues such as transient failures and redirects. We handle this for you.
- Unit testability Writing tests for cloud endpoints is difficult. We provide you with Stub connections that simulate a cloud without creating network connections. In this way, you can write your unti tests without mocking complexity or the brittleness of remote connections.
- Performance We have a pluggable engine which gives you more horsepower when you need it. Our high performance engine uses executors and nio to scale efficiently.
Many thanks to Adrian for his hard work on this, and if you’re using jclouds to manage your ElasticHosts instances, do let us know.
