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Google App Engine billing changes and my website monitoring service

November 3, 2011 in Projects, Services, Web Development with 0 Comments

A long long time ago I wrote a simple little monitoring service on Google App Engine. It’s been happily ticking over for the last couple of years but with the recent changes to Google’s App Engine pricing, I’m going to have to make some changes.

This is a blog post for those who do use the service (there’s over 100 of you!) and may care about whether it is still monitoring your site. I sent this email to you all (sorry for the spam!) and will make any further updates on this site to save your inbox tears.

Hi, All

I’m Ashley, I made the website monitoring service you signed up for
here: http://monitor.aschroder.com/ – if you no longer use it, or
don’t care, please delete this email – I won’t be sending any more.

If you’re still with us so far, firstly sorry to spam all of you, but
there’s been some important changes by Google in the way they price
the App Engine platform, and apps like this monitor service, are not
free any more.

I’ll do my best to do a quick rewrite of the monitor in a way that can
keep the running costs at zero, but if I can’t, I’m going to have to
shut it down. If that does happen, I’ll gladly open source the code,
so that you can all run your own version of it, on your own app engine
accounts.

As promised I won’t email any of you about this again, I know how
annoying emails like this are. If you use and care about the service
working, subscribe at http://www.aschroder.com for updates on the
future of the monitor, and the code if/when it is open-sourced.

Any questions, please just ask me.

Kind regards,
Ashley
aschroder.com

So either there’ll be an update about what the new service does and does not do, or there’ll be some code so you can run it yourself. D-Day is Nov 7.

I will just say, I’m still a big fan of App Engine, despite the changes – it’ll remain my platform of choice for future projects until something better comes along.

OrderPipe.com Multi-channel Sales Dashboard for Magento, Amazon and Shopify

November 2, 2011 in Magento, Web Development with 6 Comments

There’s been a distinct lack of new Magento content here for the last few months. That’s because I’ve been busily beavering away on our latest internal project which I’d like to share with you. It’s only partly Magento related, so bear with me. We’ve created a multi-channel mobile sales dashboard on Google App Engine called OrderPipe, and it’s now been made publicly available. It aggregates order data from multiple online sales channels for consumption on mobile and desktop.

OrderPipe.com screenshot

We launched a private beta trial at the end of September, and are nearing a point where we’ll be making it generally available (albeit initially free) to everyone.

I thought I’d take this opportunity to tell you about it, what it does (technically), and why it may interest you.
Continue Reading…

Monitor your Magento Store with MageSpeedTest.com

July 6, 2011 in Magento, Magento Speed Test, Web Development with 7 Comments

I snuck/sneaked out a new feature for MageSpeedTest.com last week: Performance Monitoring.

Basically it’s the same simple Magento performance test you know and love, run every 6, 12 or 24 hours. If the results of the regular tests differ by more than your preset tolerance, you get an email warning you – simple.

I wanted to soft launch it to a) try it myself in production for a while and b) get some tester feedback.

So with positive results from both I am now officially announcing the new Magento Monitoring feature and inviting you all to try it for free!

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Clustering WordPress on Amazon EC2 micro instances

June 28, 2011 in PHP, Web Development with 14 Comments

If you are reading this, you are an unwitting participant in my latest experiment: clustering my blog on Amazon EC2 – thanks! You will be connecting to my blog on one of several Amazon EC2 micro instances, cobbled together in a quick and dirty solution that was more knee-jerk reaction to some downtime, than well thought out project.

This post serves as a chance for me to test if the cluster works, and a summary of the architecture I have set up using several EC2 micro instances and WordPress. It’s a quick and dirty little WordPress cluster using spot-request micro instances at $0.007/hour – how fun!
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Magento and Amazon’s CloudFront CDN – The Easy Way

May 2, 2011 in Magento, Web Development with 26 Comments

In this post I will cover a simple way to configure Magento to use the Amazon CloudFront CDN service and to create a CloudFront distrubution that mirrors the static files in your site. This method relies on the custom origin functionality announced late last year when CloudFront came out of beta. But first, a little background.

A CDN (content distribution network) is a network of servers that puts your files and content closer to the user requesting them, and thus they can get the quicker. Using a CDN has a nice side effect of offloading some work from your own server too – which if you use Apache means less processes on your server for each customer.

When Amazon first announced CloudFront I got very excited about the prospect of writing an extension to automatically sync a Magento store’s media with an S3 bucket, to enable this simple, affordable CDN solution. Alas, it turned out to be quite hairy dealing with the subtle race conditions that can occur when first accessing a specific media file that may not be available on the CDN yet.

With the introduction of custom origin functionality there is no situation where the CDN won’t have the file. If the CDN doesn’t have the file, it gets it from the underlying source server, if it already has it, it serves it. This means the first request for a file will be a bit slower, but after that it’ll be quick.

So to make a CloudFront distribution work in Magento it only takes two steps.
Continue Reading…

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