Intridea's MediaPlug Used for VisualCV

Intridea announced that VisualCV has integrated Intridea's MediaPlug media appliance server with its software for building, sharing and managing Internet resumes.

 

As a result, company officials say, VisualCV customers can create "media-rich resumes," called "VisualCVs," that include photos, audio, video and more. Because MediaPlug uses cloud computing via Amazon Web Services, VisualCV doesn't have hardware requirements to manage and store data-intensive media files.

 

"VisualCV is committed to changing the way recruiting and career management are conducted online, and Intridea is a strategic partner in that effort," said Scott Herman, vice president of product development at VisualCV. You can view an example of a visual CV, Herman's own, at www.VisualCV.com/scottherman.

 

Web services using Ruby on Rails has allowed integration between VisualCV's resume application and Intridea MediaPlug. When members want to upload multimedia files, MediaPlug takes the files from the VisualCV application, transcodes them, re-sizes them as needed, checks for viruses and then store them on the Amazon Simple Storage System.

 

"Though handled by different servers," company officials say, "the media files and resumes appear to members as a single online document."

 

Herman said his company "went from engaging Intridea in October 2007, to delivering alpha code in December, and then launching our public beta in February 2008."

 

In May Intridea announced the debut of Scalr, what company officials describe as "the self-curing and self-scaling hosting environment" using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.

 

For $50 per month, you can use Scalr to set up server farms capable of scaling up to 100,000 or more users. The on-demand service requires no installation or configuration. The product is being introduced in conjunction with RailsConf 2008, being held May 29 - June 1 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland.

 

Scalr is built on Amazon Web Services and lets developers create server farms through a Web-based interface using pre-built Amazon Machine Images for load balancers, such as Pound or Nginx; application servers, including Apache among others; databases, such as MySQL; and a generic AMI that developers can customize.

 

Once a developer sets up a server farm, Scalr monitors and maintains it, providing automatic scaling, redundancy and failover as needed. When the load average on a type of node goes above a configurable threshold, a new node is inserted into the farm to spread the load, and the cluster is reconfigured. When a node crashes, Scalr inserts a new machine of that type into the farm to replace it

 

Developers can further customize each AMI in Scalr, bundle the image, and use it for future nodes that are inserted into the farm. They can also change one machine and use that for a specific type of node. New machines of this type will be brought online to meet current levels and the old machines are terminated one by one.