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Stallion 2 progress (with screenshots!)
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.
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
Comments
Still based off of solus?
That's a fine looking panel there!
Awesome, sounds like a lot of cool stuff is coming!
Nice new features!
nice! congrats
It looks really great. I can't wait to see the BuyVM+ cPanel, the VPS control panel, and the billing/support system all in one pannel with one login.
@MrObvious I think he is asking if features/functionality are similar to that of solus, not is it using the same code.
@MrObvious codeigniter framwork and bootstrap are all visual stuff. I wonder if it will be like the current stallion where they say it is their own but it is just solus
Looks nice!
Uh? codeigniter is a backend PHP framework <_<
The only thing we used that was solus was their very old frontend.
Stallion 1 was pretty terrible code for a lot of it. The only parts that were really good were ones that got hammered a lot (bandwidth accounting, billing/provision API's, etc)
Francisco
... what?
It'll take some time
The original Frantech SharedSQL was done using a panel I wrote myself but when we did BuyVM we decided using cPanel was easier than writing a module for WHMCS, etc.
That panel was based on prototype w/ PHP, etc. It worked fine but was far from an ideal system.
Francisco
Sorry I was typing to fast, but you arent going to make an entire control panel (Like VPS node side)out of codeigniter
Why wouldn't you? o_O We are?
There's some C involved but that's at the very node end of things and that's all written by us as well. Remember, Solus' setup is all based for Centos. We run debian on everything.
Francisco
Fair enough, I like the panel. Keep up the good work!
It's getting there
We're using libvirt for the KVM side of things like in stallion 1. We can reuse a lot of the node side code since that got a rewrite last year.
We considered libvirt for openvz but it's crappy at best and I'd rather just use my C wrappers for vzctl.
Francisco
I like.
Is there going to be some sort of prize if we find a bug?
I may do that actually.
Maybe a small account credit (buck or two) or some free 128's.
I'll be pushing backend controls out to a select few this weekend most likely to start fiddling with. I've done a good job testing it all on my own but it's always best to get other eyes as well.
Front end I'll do a public release and stock up ~100 accounts.
Francisco
Me want to test uncle Fran. Can I open a new account for stallion 2?
Best I can do on KVM is monitor IOPs & CPU%. I could still include those for alerts I guess.
@jcaleb - It's just backend stuff like client CRUD, media CRUD, etc. When I do public beta for the client side I'll post it on here with a signup page.
Francisco
Wow. That's pretty amazing. Too bad it'll take so long for all the features to be implemented
Looks great, hope it's secure as it is pretty! Also glad cPanel is being decomissioned as it was a bit of a pain to use that with a non-hosting purpose.
Probably won't take as long as I mentioned.
If I can find a paid developer I like I'll likely bring them on and get a lot more done
Francisco
You could resort to the next best option.
Create an optional package to make the monitoring.
@Francisco So does plan 19 "BZ is going to SHIT" fall under leb pricing?
Hah! Took someone long enough to notice
Francisco
That's true but i doubt people would want to commit to the abusive process monitoring. Maybe just statistics monitoring they'd be OK with? RAM, diskspace/etc.
Francisco
This is just so glorious.