An interesting facet of the development and systems administration business is the number of 80% projects that build up over time. An 80% project is that awesome library, script, rewrite, new system, or what have you that’s cooling on your back burner. It’s almost done but it’s missing the finishing touches. Maybe it needs a few code tweaks. Maybe it needs a little more documentation. Maybe you’re still finalizing settings and playing with patches. Don’t lie; we know you’ve got these projects hanging around. I’ve got a list of 80% projects as long as my arm.

It’s time to check something off my 80% projects list. I’ve finally finished documenting and am happy to release the SoftLayer API Perl client library! This module will make Perl API hackers’ lives a whole lot easier. Previously you had to build SOAP API calls manually using the SOAP::Lite module and parse the response into something easier to handle. Now you can accomplish the same thing with a series of easy to use helper methods. Functionality is very similar to our PHP client but with a Perl twist. For instance, you can do clever one liners!

use SoftLayer::API::SOAP;

# Grab my account information.
my $account = SoftLayer::API::SOAP->new(
    'SoftLayer_Account',
    undef,
    'my API username',
    'my API key')->getObject();

Check out our README for many and more comprehensive examples. Download the library from our github page at:

 

http://github.com/softlayer/softlayer-api-perl-client

 

As with all of our projects we’re very open to feedback, so please comment or post on our forums and let us know what you think. I can’t wait knock a few more 80% projects off the ol’ list. You’re going to love them. See y’all next time!

After a three hour flight that took five hours from LA to Dallas I’m finally home from the Southern California Linux Expo. This was SCaLE’s 8th show, an evolution that started as a meeting of Linux User Groups from the Los Angeles area that grew into one of the largest Linux, open technology, and community focused events in the region.

This is my second year attending SCaLE. I went last year as a part of an open source project I was working with and had a pretty good time. I jumped at the chance to go again when I found SoftLayer had a booth at and was sponsoring SCaLE 8x.

I’m really glad I went; I dig these community-focused events. What strikes me about these events, and SCaLE in particular, was the general optimism of the staff, attendees, speakers, and exhibitors. This show is on a weekend, and people came because they genuinely care about FOSS, cool new (and sometimes old) tech, and community advocacy. Most attendees fit the classic nerd stereotype. We got to meet our fair share of skinny pale guys, scruffy and ponytailed sysadmin types, and bearded folks with wallet chains and Star Trek t-shirts.

When not working our booth I was able to duck out and attend some of the talks at the expo. Aside from being informative (I picked up a lot about technical writing that I can’t wait to throw into our API documentation), every single talk I attended was completely packed to the point where there was standing room only. It’s refreshing to see speakers talk about things other than the company they work for. Instead, they focused on cool tech or how to be more productive in your community or with a specific technology. I took pages and pages of notes this weekend, it felt like being in school again.

I think SoftLayer did well at SCaLE 8x. We got our name out like we usually do at these events, and got to introduce a new group of people to SoftLayer and our ever-changing and sometimes hidden industry. I hope we’re sponsoring SCaLE 9x. Even if we don’t you’ll still find me there. See you next year!

We’ve opened up the backend API that powers our CloudLayer Storage systems for y’all. Those of you who want more control over your cloud storage accounts and content should definitely check this out.

We’ve got instructions conveniently hosted on our cloud systems:

CloudLayer™ Storage API v.1 Documentation (1.3MB)

This is a bit of a departure from our standard API. It only covers manipulation of CloudLayer Storage accounts, and is accessed via REST-full URLs. Head dev honcho Nathan gave us a rundown of how to access it in curl a while back. It’s incredibly powerful and gives you complete control over what you host and share on the cloud. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

Every year I get the same question from my customers, “Hey Klaude, are we going to see you at HostingCon this year?”. Every year I respond with the same thing, “I have no idea. I’ll ask!”. Every year I hear from my management, “Not this year, Kevin.” after I ask if I can go. Representing SoftLayer at the big trade shows is a coveted job amongst the SoftLayer enlisted, especially for an event like HostingCon.

This year I was asked the same thing I’m asked every year, but this time it was suggested that I could probably tag along with the cool kids if I gave a talk or ran a session. That’s a pretty good idea. I pitched it to my boss, and to my surprise he agreed. That’s great! Now all I have to do is schedule a presentation, and I’m set! A month or so full of research and agonizing over minutia has led to a talk I’ll be giving with Ilya Baimetov from Parallels about providing services with APIs. Our slot is at 3:00PM on Wednesday, August 12th. Stop on by if you’re in the Washington DC area, want to see a giant collection of businesses in the hosting industry, and want to visit the guys who run your favorite dedicated and cloud hosting company. When not speaking you’ll find me at the SoftLayer booth giving API demos and free hugs.

SoftLayer is well represented in the HostingCon event schedule. Our CFO, Mike Jones, is headlining Monday’s keynote “Surviving the Financial Crisis”, and CTO Nathan Day is participating in Tuesday’s general discussion “Offering Cloud Services to Your Customers”. The event runs form Monday, August 10 to Wednesday, August 12 at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland. We’d love to meet you. Drop on by and say hi!

If you haven’t done so yet, please migrate your apps and scripts based on version 1 of the SoftLayer API to version 3. Version 3 is chock full of tools and methods that touch every single facet of your servers, your account, and our business. If you’ve been following threads on our forums since last March then you’re likely using our latest API and don’t need to migrate anything. We’ve sent notices to those of you who have recently used API version 1. Check out the migration page on our wiki for some tips on how to update from version 1 to version 3.

We plan to turn the old API off on August 1, 2009. Please post to our forums if you need help migrating or open a support ticket if you’d like to work one-on-one. Thanks, everyone!

I’ve been working with quite a few PHP users on our forums over the past few months. One thing I love is the sheer variety of tasks you guys are accomplishing. One thing I don’t really love is how y’all use the sample code we provided when we launched our new API last year. Our examples work great for API v1 to API v3 migrations, but those simple functions don’t really do our current API justice.

To that end I’ve written a new PHP API client. This small library will let you take real advantage of the features our API has to offer (like object masks, result limits, proper exception catching, and the like) in both SOAP and XML-RPC. Please download it from our new presence on the github social code hosting site. Come check us out at:

http://github.com/softlayer/

Right now all that’s up there is our PHP API client. We’ll put more client libraries and projects up as we make them. We’ve got a a few in the works right now. If you’ve already got a github account come find us! We love to meet those who want to use and modify our work. If you have a favorite language that you want to see a client library for please let us know and we’ll see what we can do. The next language on my hit list is Python 2.6. See y’all next time!

Howdy everyone! We’ve been pounding some really cool features out lately and just updated our documentation wiki with their API services. In addition to a whole ton of new additions to the SoftLayer_Account, SoftLayer_Hardware_Server, and our other staple services we’re proud to introduce:

• SoftLayer_Network_ContentDelivery_Account – Control hosting on our content delivery network.
• SoftLayer_Network_Media_Transcode_Account – Configure and use SoftLayer’s free (as in beer!) media transcoding service.
• SoftLayer_Network_LoadBalancer_Global_Account – This’ll help you out if you run large and geographically diverse websites.

I love the wide collection of services we’ve got running here. Quite a few of the features available in our CDNLayer API is from direct user feedback. If you have any questions how to use these services or want us to implement a feature drop us a line on our forums. In the meantime happy coding, everyone!

It’s been a little over a week since our API launch. I haven’t heard from anyone who doesn’t like it, so that must mean we’re doing it right. We’ve been spending time lately catching up on little quirks and documentation bugs. Our first example is up. Its for you Perl jockeys, and really exemplifies the flexibility and power of object masks in your API handling code. We’ve got a .NET one coming up soon. You guys are going to love how easy it is to use this in Visual Studio. We’ve got plans for PHP and Java coming up too. If there’s a language or implementation you want to see please let us know!

In other news, SoftLayer has recently launched a shiny new Facebook group. Sign in and join up to talk with us and get your hands-on exclusive content (which currently is videos of me rambling about the API). As always, we’re here if you have questions, concerns, or just want to chat. See you next time!

Before I get to the good stuff I want to apologize to you guys. I haven’t been active in my API evangelism as of late. Heck, as of the last few months. Well here’s why. I am extremely ecstatic to announce the release of SoftLayer’s API version 3.0! This has been a long time coming here at the SoftLayer devCave. This little gem has been in development for about 9 months now, and it’s very fulfilling to see it finally come out. But enough about how happy we are. Here’s the goods, what makes this different from API version 1:

- The SoftLayer API now explicitly specifies the data types it uses, making it far easier to write in major programming languages like Java and .NET.
- This go around we’re object-oriented. Anything that you can do in it is modeled by a service and data type. Where API version 1 had one endpoint and about 20 methods, API version 3 has about 50, one per service, and about 390 methods. That leads me to…
- It does everything. Seriously, this API lets you manage every single one of your SoftLayer servers and services. In fact it lets you do everything that our portal lets you do (except purchasing servers, but we’ll get to that). For you guys that have been asking, yes that includes DNS management and OS reloads.

We like this API so much that for the past month we’ve been busting our humps rewriting our customer portal as an API application. I just checked our system statistics. Load on our database is down by 25%, and load on our portal web servers is down about 10%. There’s a noticeable improvement in portal responsiveness since we’ve started this project. A great side effect of rewriting our portal as an API application is that when we bust out new services they go into the API immediately.

If you’ve been developing against API version 1 then take a look at our migration guide and FAQ on our brand-spanking-new SLDN documentation wiki. We’re really looking forward to making (and help you guys make) some cool apps with this. This is a big change for us, so please don’t be shy in letting us know what you think. Our forums and email are waiting!

In preparation for the new Seattle launch this Monday we’ve updated getHardwareList() to return a “Location” string at the end of the return array. Location reads “Dallas” for servers in Dallas and strangely enough it reads “Seattle” for servers in Seattle. It’s great to see all this prep-work coming together, though I think we developers will need a nap once the dust settles. In the mean time there’s always Monster.