Yes, that's 'fastest', not closest.

Background

A while back I published a blog post entitled Finding the closest data center using GeoIP and indexing, which described how we automatically determine the AWS regional data center to be used for storing encrypted server backups.

Ladies and gentle geeks, I'm proud to announce we've just pushed out 100% free basic server monitoring to all TurnKey Hub accounts. This should make it easier to keep tabs on the health and performance of your cloud servers. Existing Hub users don't need to do anything to enjoy this new feature. It just works.

A better server dashboard

As you can see in the screenshot below, the server dashboard now includes thumbnail graphs of CPU utilization, disk IO and network traffic for the last hour:

Most TKLBAM users probably don't realize this, but TKLBAM has a nifty, general purpose hooks mechanism you can use to trigger useful actions on backup and restore.

Examples of hooks:

• Cleaning up temporary files
• Stopping/starting services to increase data consistency
• Encoding/decoding data from non-supported databases
• Using LVM to create/restore a snapshot of a fast changing volume

Open source development is usually fun and rewarding. You get to work on whatever you like. No permission required. No "business justification". Here's this thing I've created, isn't it neat? There's a deep sense of satisfaction in making things. Especially when other people find them useful. It's also pretty awesome when people decide what you've made is interesting enough that they want to join in and help make it better. Successful projects often form into communities. Strangers from all over the world turned into enthusiastic users, co-developers. Friends.

The only parts that suck are that:

1. It is a bit more difficult to make a living purely from open source software. Giving stuff away generally doesn't pay very well.
2. Some people just don't get it.