Use your iPhone to manage your public/private cloud

Back in March I wrote about the web-based cloud management provider ScaleXtreme and their agent based remote management application for public and private clouds. ScaleXtreme has continued to upgrade their service (adding support for Windows Azure cloud services), and built on their very compelling set of services, but when I first looked at the product I felt that they had not done a very good job of providing management via mobile devices, despite their release of an iPhone app that had originally brought them to my attention.

Well it seems that ScaleXtreme has taken my comments (and I'm sure the feedback of their paying users) to heart and released a new version of their iPhone app that actually includes functionality that allows the user to update and deploy services via the ScaleXtreme template model. The original version of the iPhone application allowed the administrator only a view of their servers and services.

It's still necessary to use the web console to create your initial server and services templates or to add their pre-created templates to your cloud management, but once you've setup templates that you want to use for your business they become available for deployment via the library screen in the iPhone application.

The new app also lets you explicitly configure what aspects of your server management you want to display. Choosing not to display items doesn't turn off their monitoring; it just doesn't display the results of that monitoring on your phone while turned off.

There is still no iPad-specific version of their monitoring tool, though Safari does display their web console properly. An HTML 5 or iPad specific app could add significant value to the mobile user and I hope that ScaleXtreme is considering this possibility.