24x7 and The Cloud!

I have a suggestion for a future version of 24x7.

Their is a company called GoGrid which sell virtual servers (ala Cloud) at a really cheap rate. They also provide an API interface to start, stop and monitor your virtual servers remotely.

It would be really cool if 24x7 had the ability when a job is run to be able to check if a remote agent was running (on a virtual machine) and if it isnt then it would call the GoGrid API to launch the virtual server, run the job (or jobs) on the virtual server and then shut the virtual server down.

The reason why this would be so cool is that you only pay for the amount of ram you use and the amount of time you use it for. So with 24x7 you could start some really hungry jobs on multiple servers which may only need to run for a few minutes each and then you shut them down and you are no longer paying.

I know it would be possible to do this myself by creating a pre/post job to start and stop the virtual servers before a job runs but I am sure that the way cloud computing is set to go forward with Amazon, Microsoft etc I think this could be a really good feature to add in to 24x7.

Nathan

There is AgentTest function that can be used for this purpose. PingPort can be used too.

Cool I will look at seeing if I can write something to work with virtual servers. Has anyone else manged to do this yet?

Nathan