Adventures in F,O, X, & 0

The experience of setting up dozens and dozens of VPS servers individually by hand (for the first "test run" course) was "interesting", and only served to encourage me to move in a direction which I'd always looked to do eventually - the cloud. Frankly the manual process works OK it's just that it's Not Fun and it doesn't scale very well. For my course case it's already clear that several hundred small servers will be needed, so automation is a must. In theory it's probably possible to automate the purchase and provisioning of traditional VPSs, but it's not an option with VolumeDrive.com, and of course there may be underlying physical limitation to just how much they can quickly setup. My feeling is that I'll retain the current class set of server at VolumeDrive, but work to be able to add in further sets via (probably) Amazon's AWS. If provisioning is done right they should all work much the same, with some simple scripts us...

Well, t he Course is being launched today - with the first lessons going out on Monday the 5th of November. Exciting stuff. If you've been following along you'll know that it's been a long gestation, with the final product being very pared back - an MVP in the jargon - but I'm pleased with the result and very happy with the tools I've chosen and used now: Blogger , Google Apps , and Squarespace . The payment side uses Paypal - which I've found easy to make work, but this would be the one thing that I may change in the future. So, now off to setup more servers for the first participants!