TOP ARTICLES OF THE WEEK

• Rackspace: The Cloud Warning Label




• MaxCDN: How we improved our API response time by 95%

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

TOP NEWS & PRODUCT UPDATES

• Heroku: API Updates + A New Way To Define App Configurations

   

  • Heroku Platform API now GA- With the Platform API, you now have a fully documented and supported way to instrument and automate Heroku.- May 19

  • The Heroku HTTP API Toolchain- Heroku has open sourced the toolchain they use to design, document, and consume their HTTP APIs. The toolchain includes: An HTTP API design guide, describing how they structure both internal and public-facing APIs and document them using the JSON Schema standard, among other tools.- May 20

  • Introducing programmatic builds on Heroku- There's an addition to the Heroku Platform API: The /apps/:app/builds endpoint. This endpoint exposes the Heroku slug compilation process as a simple API primitive. You can use the endpoint to turn any publicly hosted source-tarball into a slug running on a Heroku app in seconds.- May 21

  • Introducing the app.json Application Manifest- app.json enables developers to define their applications' details, setup configurations and runtime environments in a structured way. Instead of providing step-by-step instructions, you can now add app.json files to your applications' source code. You and other developers can then easily deploy the source code into fully configured apps on Heroku, ready for further development.- May 22



• AWS: Updates to EC2, RDS, S3, EBS

   

  • Amazon EC2: EC2 Expansion - G2 and C3 Instances in Additional Regions- The G2 instances are now available in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) and Asia Pacific (Singapore) Regions. All five sizes of C3 instances are now available in the South America (São Paulo) Region.- May 20

  • Amazon RDS: Multi-AZ for SQL Server- This new release takes advantage of SQL Server Mirroring technology. Setting up traditional SQL Server Mirroring requires hundreds of manual steps at the database and operating system level. With RDS, you can launch a fully managed, highly available instance of SQL Server with a few clicks in the AWS Management Console.- May 19

  • Amazon S3: Amazon S3 Lifecycle Management for Versioned Objects- You can now create and apply Lifecycle rules to buckets that use versioned objects. For example, you can arrange to keep the current version of an object in S3, and to transition older versions to Glacier.- May 20

  • Amazon EBS: New EBS Encryption for Additional Data Protection- You can now encrypt data stored on an EBS volume at rest and in motion by setting a single option.- May 21



• Trello: The Search Features You’ve Been Looking For- All of your card content is now searchable and presented in a simpler interface, with a brand new set of operators to help you narrow your searches down. Where before search only found cards if your terms were in their title and description, now the comments, checklists, and names of attachments on the card are part of the same unified search.- May 20




• Stripe: Send money to debit cards- To send money to a bank account identified by a debit card, just attach the card number to your recipient and initiate a transfer as normal. Just like sending funds to bank accounts, a transfer to a debit card costs 25¢. The funds will currently arrive in the card’s bank account in 1-2 business days. U.S. Visa and MasterCard debit cards are supported.- May 22




• Zopim: Zopim Chat Integrates with Zendesk- Since Zendesk's acquisition of Zopim, both engineering teams have been working on integration between the two platforms. To make it easier to chat and manage tickets they've built a new Zopim integration right inside the Zendesk dashboard. Instead of switching between the Zopim and Zendesk Dashboards, you can now engage with all your customers from one interface. - May 22




• HockeyApp: Presenting CrashProbe- HockeyApp has created a new tool, CrashProbe, a crash reporting test suite that benchmarks and compares popular iOS and Mac OS X crash reporting services. CrashProbe is open source, so you can perform all tests yourself with any crash reporting framework.- May 23




• Google Compute Engine: Official CoreOS images now available  +  Open Preview of Docker on Google Cloud Platform- Running CoreOS on Compute Engine allows you to connect your front-end and back-end services running on CoreOS to a fully managed Cloud Datastore or Cloud SQL database. Applications that store user-generated content on Google Cloud Storage can easily start worker instances on the CoreOS cluster to process items as they are uploaded. Google Compute Engine is extending its support for Docker containers. This release is an Open Preview of a container-optimized OS image that includes Docker and an open source agent to manage containers. The container OS image includes: Debian 7, the Docker runtime, and an open-source metadata framework and an agent to create and manage containers based on the metadata.- May 23