Well, this project is not really a secret anymore and people start to ask about it, so let me present the beast :
This is the ALOHA Pocket. Probably the smallest load balancer you have ever seen from any vendor. It is a full-featured ALOHA with layer 4/7, SSL, VRRP, the complete web interface with templates, the logs… It consumes less than a watt (0.75W to be precise) and is powered over USB. It can run for about ten hours from a single 2200mAh battery. Still it achieves more than a thousand connections per second and forward 70 Mbps between the two ports. Yes, this is more than what some applications we’ve seen in field deliver on huge servers consuming 1000 times this power and running with 4000 times its amount of RAM. This is made possible thanks to our highly optimized, lightweight products which are so energy efficient and need so little resource that they can run on almost anything (and of course, they are magnified when running on powerful hardware).
Obviously nobody wants to run their production on this, it would not look serious! But we found that this is the ideal format to bring your machine everywhere, for demos, for tests, to develop in the train, or even just to tease friends. And it’s so cool that I have several of them on my desk and others in my bag and am using them all the day for various tests. And while using it I found that it was so much more convenient to use than a VM when explaining high availability to someone that we realized that it’s the format of choice for students discovering load balancing and high availability. Another nice thing is that since it has two ports, it’s perfect for plugging between your PC and the LAN to observe the HTTP communications between your browser and the application you’re developing.
So we decided to prepare one hundred of them that we’ll offer to students and interns working on a load balancing project, in exchange for their promise to blog about their project’s progress. If they need we can even send them a cluster of two. And who knows, maybe among these, someone will have a great idea and develop a worldwide successful project, and then we’ll be very proud to have provided the initial spark that made this possible. And if it helps students get a career around load balancing, we’ll be quite proud to transmit this passion as well!
We still have a few things to complete before it can go wild, such as a bit of documentation to explain how to start with it. But if you think you’re going to work on a load balancing project or are joining a company as an intern and will be doing some stuff with web servers, this can be the perfect way to discover this new amazing world to design solutions which resist to real failures caused by pulling off a cable and not just the clean “power down” button pressed in a VM. Start thinking about it to reserve one (or a pair) when we launch it in the upcoming weeks. Conversely if you absolutely want one, you just have to find a load balancing project to work on 🙂
In any case, don’t wait too much to think about your project, because the stock is limited, so if there is too much demand, we’ll have to selective on the projects we’re going to support for the last ones.
Stay tuned!
looks a lot like gl-inet 🙂
It indeed is a gl-inet inside. It has the specs I’ve been seeking for 10 years.
Hi, we are speaking at a conference here in Zagreb in June – we would love two demo units to explain to the group how to scale with open source technology.
The conference includes Red Hat and various other vendors.
Could you contact me for potentially buying 2, or borrowing just for the conference?
Many thanks!
Hi Stuart,
We’ll contact you shortly about the procedure to get them delivered to you.
Baptiste
Great! Many thanks for your speedy response 🙂
How can we get our hands on a couple of these? Working on a Social IOT Platform and would like to see how we might be able to incorporate something like these for helping to load balance some edge routers.
Thanks.
-wf
Well, the plan is that we’d like to offer them to students willing to publicly describe their project and their progress on such project. I guess if you’re going to be open about your project and to regularly publish any progress you make, you can be eligible even if you’re not a student. We’re finishing a little bit of doc, it’s almost ready.
Hello !
I am working on HAProxy since september 2015 !
I am an intern i a big mobile company in France and i work in Paris.
It would be a honor for me to have one of these because i have to provide a working loadbalancing system this year for a client and it has to be perfect.
I can share my project publicly and publish my progress.
please contact me on hamzabentayebcisco@gmail.com