Hello everyone,
TL;DR - a long read but a good look into what's on the menu
Since quite a few users wanted to see progress on how stallion has been coming along I figured I'd put together a gallery so you can see. Most of the pages are backend but there's some shots of what the front end will look like, more or less.
http://imgur.com/a/Gsr2w
We're finally making some head way on the whole project after letting go of the last dev I had handling the project. They took almost a year to handle what I figure is a 2 - 3 month project. We also recently hired a new designer as we felt the interface we had going last time wasn't flowing how we wanted it to. While the last design was fully responsive, meaning it would work on a cell phone even, it didn't flow how I wanted it to on a desktop (where the vast majority of our users will be using it).
Release features
Given how far behind we are, the initial release will be to just have all features that stallion 1 has, as well as many that need fixing (stats for instance), put into the new code base. Stallion 2 is a complete rewrite from the ground up using codeigniter for the framework with the interface being bootstrap + sexy features.
Short term new features
Within the first month of stallion 2 going up we'll have our new alerts system fully merged, informing users when they're running excessively high loads, processes they shouldn't, extremely high conntracks, nullroutes, excessive CPU, etc. This will all be displayed in a easy to use control panel.
Most of the above alerts system will only work on OpenVZ as there's no way to monitor inside a KVM w/o breaching some serious trust & privacy policies.
Longer term features
As mentioned, some of the biggest features we're bringing in is high availability settings. Floating IP's is the first one that will come in fairly early into things. This will allow users to have mulitple VM's in the same location and be able to shuffle a single IP between multiple VM's using their own heartbeat implementations. This will be supported on both OpenVZ & KVM.
By late summer/fall we expect to have full anycast IP support with personalized routing also integrated (meaning if you don't have a VM in one of our locations, you can have the requested routed by to another location of your choice, or by simply 'geographically closest').
Likely around the same time as the anycast support, we'll integrate hosted loadbalancers. This will allow users that don't want to run their own HA setup to use an extremely affordable (either a couple bucks a month or even free) hosted load balancer where it'll redirect traffic to the VM's of your choice. I'll likely do something where HTTP traffic will be balanced for free but anything else will require your own dedicated IP bound to the balancer.
BuyVM+, currently being hosted through cPanel, will be merged fully into stallion as well. Users will be able to control their databases fully as well as an unmetered amount of DNS records. We'll likely work out proper master/slave support for DNS zones so users can merge BuyVM+ into their current platforms.
We'll also be moving away from WHMCS and building our own billing & support systems right into stallion. While WHMCS works well and Aldryic knows the hook system quite well, he's finding he's having to write more and more hooks just to get it to handle fraud/validation how he wants. At this point it'd actually be less work for him to just write his own systems as modules in stallion 2.
Closing remarks & timelines
I fully expect to be in public beta testing of everything by the end of this month or early next month. I'm handling all the development at this point with Aldryic stepping in for anything that related to billing API's. He'll be handling most/all of the new billing system once we get around to that (later this year).
There are many features I've not mentioned above, but those I'll keep quiet since they're a lot easier to copy than the ones I did mention
No need to give competitors ideas.
Thank you everyone for your interest,
Francisco
