Introducing SimplerCloud!

This article is originally posted here.

It has been very exciting days (and nights) for all of us here at SimplerCloud in the past month. Building a top-notch and world-class, built-from-the-ground cloud infrastructure is not easy, but we are very happy that we are now coming to this stage that we are ready to roll-out our services. We built SimplerCloud after realizing that there are no Asian cloud computing providers who can provide a true automated and 100% self-manageable cloud servers with high-performing, fast SSD servers and painless, instant deployment and on-the-fly scaling.

The main features of our services are our virtual machines (VM), which we call Servelets. They are on-demand, scalable virtualized servers accessible over the Internet. They are set up instantly, very easy to manage, and extremely reliable. Those Servelets are deployed in real-time and will be ready for use just minutes upon confirmation of the order. The most important thing is that they are more affordable than anything found in the market today.

And when we say it’s affordable, we really mean it. Our smallest XS Servelet plan only costs US$10 a month, without any contract commitments. This comes with 1 GB RAM, 20 GB blazing-fast SSD storage, 1 vCPU core and 1 TB of data transfer. It will be very difficult to get that kind of price for a cloud server, not only here in Singapore, but also in Asia.

Of course, our ability to bring the price down doesn’t sacrifice on quality. We want to provide cloud services which are easy, instant and reliable. All our servelets sit on very fast systems powered by SSD (solid-state) drives in a distributed and scalable storage system on high performance 10Gbps links. SSD uses integrated circuit assemblies as memory to store data persistently, without any moving mechanical components, unlike traditional hard drives. The result is a blazing fast I/O performance for your servelets, 3-10 times normal hard drives.

In addition to our Servelets, we also provide additional services such as domain registrations and SSL certificate. For domain registrations, we are currently providing TLD (top level domain) registrations for .com, .org, .net, .biz, .info and .name, starting from US$ 14.95 per month! More TLDs will be added soon, including country-level ccTLDs such as .SG and .ID. We also provides free DNS hosting for our customers. As for SSL certificate, we provide basic and wildcard SSL certificates starting from just US$ 29.90 per year.

All the above services can be ordered and managed through our simple and easy-to-use, multi-lingual control panel. At the moment both our website and our control panel are in English and Bahasa Indonesia, and more languages will be added soon. You can browse all the services that we provide, order any of the services instantly and start using those services almost immediately! Payment can be made using Paypal or credit card. You can also manage all the services that you have with us, console in to your Servelets, manage your domains and more.

So, what are you waiting for? Please visit our website, create yourself an account on our customer portal (it’s free) and start jumping into the real cloud bandwagon.

APRICOT 2013 and Traceroute Party

Last month, I attended APRICOT 2013 in Singapore. It has been a long time since I attended APRICOT or any other APNIC events. The last time I attended APRICOT was in 2010 when it was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Therefore, it was nice to meet some old and new friends during the event.

As usual, I attended only the conference and not the workshop. Some of the interesting topics discussed during the conference were:

1. Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI), which is designed for Internet routing security to prevent route hijacking or blackholing;
2. Software-Defined Networking (SDN), which is an approach to provision network connections on-the-fly, normally within cloud computing and virtualisation environment;
3. DNSSEC, in a bid to secure the DNS (Domain Name System); and
4. Last but not least, IPv4 exhaustion and the (very slow) deployment of IPv6.

This weekend, I will be going to Jakarta, Indonesia to attend Traceroute Party. This is one of the biggest gathering events related to the (very big) Indonesian Internet community, with telcos, NAPs, ISPs, content providers, game providers, Internet communities, bloggers and the Internet users in general, are expected to attend. There will be 300 exhibitors, talk-shows, workshops and last but not least, many indie bands performing live. This even is hosted by IDC Indonesia.

I will make use of the opportunity to hang around and get together with some old friends, and make some new friends as well. Some of my friends from the Indonesian ISP and Internet industry are expected to be there. I hope to meet some of my old friends during the RADNET era. Most of my friends in BemoNet community will also be there, since BemoNet has 3 booths at the event, and we don’t have any idea on how to make use of the booths. ;P  I will also make the opportunity to meet some friends from the RKTI and BlogFam communities as well.

See you in JCC this weekend. :)

Koprol Team Disbanded By Yahoo!, Will Koprol Follow Kronologger’s Fate?

Just after I read Aulia Masna’s article on Daily Social about the plan to relaunch Yahoo! Koprol in May, I was surprised to see Satya Witoelar’s tweet stating that he would post the CVs of “talented experienced ex-Yahoo_ID/Koprol ‘s developers” soon. The list was eventually posted on Satya’s blog, confirming that the whole Koprol’s developers team has been disbanded by Yahoo.

From what I understand, Yahoo! is a sinking ship, and as part of the new CEO Scott Thompson’s strategy to keep the ship afloat, Yahoo! is axing about 2,000 of its staff globally. Yahoo! Indonesia is no exception, and unfortunately Koprol’s development team has been included on the list. It beats me though, on why the whole team had to be disbanded ahead of its planned launch of the supposedly new Koprol 2.0 engine in May.

The big question now is what will be Koprol’s fate. Will the social media platform be closed? As Aulia of Daily Social has pointed out, Koprol has a strong users base in Indonesia, and when the news of possible imminent shutdown has spread out, many of its users voiced out (with special hashtag: #saveKoprol) that the platform should not be closed.

I have to admit that I have not been using Koprol for quite some time. As a location-based social media platform, it is losing out to Foursquare especially for my case here in Singapore. However, Koprol is purely made in Indonesia and by Indonesians, therefore as fellow Indonesians, we should be proud of Koprol.

I met some friends, such as Ryan, Nunil and Ari, through Koprol. I met Leo and Smitty, in person, through a Koprol gathering here in Singapore. KCR, Koprol’s community radio, inspired me to setup Radio Komunitas Twitter Indonesia (RKTI). Therefore, like it or not, I have some fond memories in Koprol.



Let’s ask Yahoo! not to close down Koprol. If Yahoo! doesn’t want to run Koprol anymore, then may be Koprol founders can request to take over back Koprol and keep on running the social media platform outside Yahoo? I’m not too sure on whether it’s possible, since I understand that Yahoo! has spent quite a lot of money to acquire Koprol way back in May 2010.

Please, do not let Koprol follow the fate of Kronologger, another Indonesian-made microblogging platform in the past, which was closed down after being acquired by now-defunct Asia Blogging Network. 

PS. Images courtesy of @candoddi and @chocoz

Happy New Year 2012

I spent the New Year’s eve in Bintan, Nirwana Garden Resorts in Bintan Resorts, Lagoi, to be exact, and spending the last day of 2011 shuttling (islands hopping, to be exact) between Bintan and Batam. Going through the change of year with mixed feelings, here’s the story.

Towards the end of 2011, I was informed that my brother’s family would be spending New Year’s eve in Bintan Resorts, and that my parents are going with them. And my mother specifically requested me to join them to celebrate the new year there. I then decided to go with my son Irza, while my wife and my daughter Inka are staying in Singapore.

My brother and his family and my parents arrived in Bintan on Friday (30/12). They took a flight from Jakarta to Batam, and then caught the speedboat from Telaga Punggur in Batam to Tanjung Uban in Bintan. There used to be a direct ferry from Telaga Punggur to Bandar Bentan Telani (BBT) ferry terminal in Bintan Resorts, but for some reason, the ferry service was not operational.

I and Irza left Singapore for Bintan on Saturday morning (31/12). We took the 9am ferry from Tanah Merah Ferry Terminal (TMFT) in Singapore, and arrived in Bandar Bentan Telani ferry terminal at 9am Bintan (WIB) time. This was when the bad news came in.

When we boarded the shuttle bus which would bring us from the ferry terminal to the resort, my brother called. He said that my mother fell off the electric bicycle she was riding, and she fractured her arm. When I and Irza arrived in the Nirwana Resort Hotel where we are staying, we immediately went to the hotel’s clinic to check my mother’s condition.

Going back to the hotel’s clinic reminded me of another unpleasant experience I had couple of years back there. When I was swimming on the sea with the kids, my foot was bitten by some kind of a poisonous fish, and I needed to spend couple of hours in the clinic to get the venom taken off my foot.

While the hotel doctor has tried her best to put a bandage for my mother’s arm, it’s not sufficient. The hotel clinic doesn’t have X-ray equipment, so my mother needs to go to the nearest hospital which has the equipment, as well as the specialized doctor who can further check her condition. Luckily, she has a friend in Batam who can arrange for an orthopaedic doctor to check my mother’s condition in Awal Bros hospital in Batam.

I then accompanied my mother and my father to go to Batam, after leaving Irza in Bintan under my brother’s care. We took a pre-arranged taxi to Tanjung Uban, from where we took a chartered speedboat to Telaga Punggur in Batam. From Telaga Punggur, we took another pre-arranged taxi to go directly to Awal Bros hospital’s emergency department.

My mother had her arm being X-rayed and the result was not good. She had three bones fractured on her left arm, and most probably would need to undergo operation. I was prepared to spend the new year in Batam when my father decided that he is bringing my mother back to Jakarta so that she can have better treatment (including operation, if necessary) there.

My parents’ Lion Air tickets to Jakarta was for the next day (1/1)’s flight, and I tried calling Lion Air hotline in Batam in a hope to change the tickets to the current day (31/12), but there was nobody picking up the phone. So we decided to go to Garuda Indonesia office located in i Hotel Batam, located near Nagoya Hill, to purchase new airline tickets to Jakarta so that my parents can fly to Jakarta on the same day.

Since my parents decide to go back to Jakarta on that day, I then had to go back to Bintan, and I needed to go back fast since the speedboats from Telaga Punggur to Tanjung Uban only operate during daylight. After sending off my parents at Hang Nadim airport in Batam and had a quick (very late) lunch at Singgalang Jaya padang restaurant there, I took a taxi to Telaga Punggur (Rp 65k). Finally I managed to secure a seat on a 4:30pm speedboat to Tanjung Uban (Rp 30k + Rp 7k tax). It was a bumpy ride to Tanjung Uban with choppy waters and a full-house boat with standing passengers.

My brother had arranged for a taxi to pick me up at Tanjung Uban jetty back to Nirwana Gardens, although I needed to wait for around 30 minutes until the taxi arrived. We had a brief stop in a sate Madura stall in front of the At-Taqwa grand mosque in Tanjung Uban, before arriving in Nirwana Resort Hotel, in time for the gala dinner and the new year’s countdown party.

It was one of the great countdown parties ever. Great gala dinner, and we also won one of the lucky prizes. Awesome live band, and great fireworks over the sea off Bintan during the countdown. But still, we celebrated the new year with mixed feelings, since at the same time, my mother arrived in Jakarta and directly checked-in to Fatmawati hospital.

The next day (1/1), I and Irza took the 2:35pm ferry back to Singapore, while uncle Arief , auntie Via, Alif and Kayla went back to Jakarta via Batam using the same route: taxi to Tanjung Uban, speedboat to Telaga Punggur, taxi to Hang Nadim airport and then the Lion Air plane back to Jakarta.

At the moment, my mother is still warded in Fatmawati hospital, and currently is undergoing pre-op examination. She might be undergoing operation on her left arm in 3-4 days.

Mohon doa dari rekan-rekan sekalian untuk kesembuhan beliau.

Happy New Year to everyone!

An Indonesian Minister’s Analysis on Singapore

Indonesia’s Communication and Information Technology Minister, Tifatul Sembiring, shared his analysis on Singapore and its relationship with Indonesia, through his Twitter account.

According to Tifatul, Singapore’s history is inseparably related to a figure of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s first prime minister and current minister mentor. On year 1959, while Singapore’s gross national product (GNP) was US$400, Lee had a vision of the GNP to have a 60-fold increase to US$24,000 by 1990. And in 1995, Singapore’s GNP was US$20,000, nearly reaching the target.

Tifatul said that he had the opportunity to have a direct discussion with Lee twice, and at the age of nearly 90 years old, Lee is described by Tifatul as “still smart”. Tifatul asked Lee on how he built Singapore, how is Indonesia’s future competitiveness, the role of China, India, Japan and South Korea, and Lee answered his questions with excitement.

Singapore is like a mini-Indonesia, multi-ethnic with Chinese majority, and Lee said, they are being “engineered” to interact with each other. As a small nation without natural resources, they have to invite people to do business in Singapore. That’s why they must have an airline with the best service, referring to Singapore Airlines (SQ).

According to Lee as quoted by Tifatul, the society have to be disciplined, there have to be certainty on law, which is enforced strictly. No smoking by law, a ban on spitting, and death penalty for drug traffickers are just the examples. There’s no democracy in Singapore, opposition is just a complement. As what Lee said, they don’t want to take the risk of political turmoil, they have to be stable. As a result, investors are streaming in.

Tifatul asked Edward Lee, a former Singapore’s ambassador for Indonesia, on what is Singapore’s modern vision. Edward replied: “Vision Hub”. Tifatul asked what does that mean, and it was explained to him that Singapore has to become the central (hub) of businesses. We (Indonesia) might be rich in oil, gas etc, but they have to be sold via Singapore, resulting in the price to follow MOPS (Mean of Platts Singapore). We might have Bali, Lake Toba, Singkarak, Maninjau, Bunaken, Senggigi, Bromo, Sentani, but visitors will have to go through Singapore, using Singapore’s travel agents.

With main businesses on finance, banking, insurance, telecommunications and trade services, and with a population of 4.5 million people, Singapore’s foreign reserves reaches US$ 120 billion. In 2005, Singapore is Indonesia’s biggest foreign investors. They are now harvesting the result of their expansion strategy (Tifatul used the term “tebar jala” in bahasa Indonesia) to neighbouring countries.

Therefore, Tifatul concluded that we have to learn from history. A crisis will not be resolved by simple amok and flag burning. There have to be “smart moves”. He’s referring to the current crisis between Indonesia and Malaysia, pertaining to the arrests of Indonesian maritime officers by Malaysia’s police.

Pangandaran is Getting Closer

This article is originally posted on ABN's Asia Travel Blog here.

Pangandaran is a famous tourist attraction, located at the south-east end of West Java province, Indonesia. Its beaches are reputably the best and finest in Java island, and also offer excellent surfing. Other than its fine beaches, Pangandaran also offer a beautiful national park and its own version of green canyon.

However, its location at the southern regency of Ciamis in West Java makes Pangandaran not really appealing to Jakarta and Bandung tourists, let alone foreign tourists. By road, it takes around 5-6 hours to reach Pangandaran from Bandung, the capital city of West Java province, and it takes around 7-8 hours to reach Pangandaran from Jakarta, capital city of Indonesia, by road.

Fortunately, there is now a faster alternative to reach Pangandaran, which is via air. Susi Air, an airline previously specialised in chartered services, has started scheduled services from Jakarta and Bandung to Pangandaran. This will cut down the travel time between Jakarta and Pangandaran to only one hour. It will operate a Cessna Grand Caravan aircraft with a capacity of 12 passengers to service the Jakarta-Pangandaran route twice a day, one direct flight and another one with a stopover in Bandung.

The flight from Jakarta will depart from Halim Perdanakusuma airport, located east of the city and closer to the city centre compared to Soekarno-Hatta International airport.

The Influenza A (H1N1) Virus is Getting Closer

After reaching Thailand, yesterday the Influenza A (H1N1) virus, previously known as the swine flu virus, is confirmed to have reached Malaysia’s soil by the country’s top health official. The patient is a 21-year-old male student who arrived on a Malaysia Airlines flight from Newark (near New York) in the Unites States, via Stockholm, Sweden.

This confirms that the virus is now getting much closer to Singapore and Indonesia. While the Malaysia official confirmed that there’s no Singaporean passengers nor any passengers with onward connecting flights to Singapore, the MH091 flight from Newark is a code share flight with Garuda Indonesia, so there could be some passengers, exposed to the infected patient on the same flight, who might have gone to Indonesia.

I wonder whether the Indonesian health officials have taken the necessary precautions on this matter. From what I understand, everyone there is very busy preparing for the presidential election.

The Ministry of Health (MOH) of Singapore says that it is only a matter of time before the virus reaches Singapore. Yes, I agree that it’s not possible to prevent the virus from entering Singapore, since the virus has been reported to be highly contagious. More efforts should be put into treating the infected patients when the virus comes in, rather than fire-fighting in preventing the virus from reaching Singapore.

However, I disagree with the Singapore government’s move to lower its alert level for the H1N1 flu from orange to yellow last week, despite the World Health Organisation (WHO) maintaining its alert level on 5 (near pandemic) out of 6. I personally think that lowering the alert level would bring Singapore residents closer to complacency and will make them become less alerted. With this latest development, it would be wise for the government to increase its alert level back to orange.

Using IM2 Broom Unlimited

I and my family are now in Jakarta, Indonesia for a (short?) two-week holiday. We left Singapore yesterday afternoon, taking Lion Air flight to Jakarta. It took more than 40 minutes for us to queue for checking-in at Singapore's Changi airport. The flight was full, there were so many passengers queuing for checking-in and yet, there were only 4 check-in counters available. It also caused around 20 minutes of delay of the flight since it took some time for all passengers to eventually checked in to the flight, despite an additional one (yes, only one, sigh) counter being set up.

We arrived at Jakarta's Soekarno-Hatta International Airport at around 4pm. It turned out that we were on the same flight as Yudi (one of my friends from the Indo-Sing community, and I initially had mistaken him as Pieter, another friend from the same community, gosh!)  and Audi (one of my band-mates) with his wife Erina and son Rifa. My parents picked us up at the airport and we went straight to Plasa Semanggi for late lunch/early dinner. Lion Air is a budget airline and they don't serve any snacks or meal on board. We also didn't have the chance to have our lunch at Changi airport prior to boarding the plane due to the check-in's long queue taking up much of our "precious" time at the airport. Had a Bakmi Gang Kelinci's chicken noodle at the food court in Plasa Semanggi, which is located on the 3A floor of the shopping mall.

I also went to Indosat's IM2 Broadband Centre located on the first floor of Plasa Semanggi, for me to buy the starter pack of IM2 Broom, for our Internet connection during our stay in Indonesia. The starter pack costs IDR 150,000, and it provides unlimited HSDPA/3.5G-based Internet connection for a month. Subsequent months will even cost less, only IDR 100,000/month. Quite worth value for money, especially since now we have mobile phones which have HSDPA capabilities so we don't need to invest for additional HSDPA modem, which can be quite costly.

I am currently using my daughter's Nokia 6120 classic phone as a HSDPA modem using the PC Suite for me to enjoy the Internet connection using my laptop. Since I'm taking the unlimited package, the maximum bandwidth speed I should get is only up to 256 KBps for the first 2 GB of data transfer, after which the bandwidth will be capped at 64 Kbps, unlimited until it expires in one month. However, seems that I could get up to 460.8 Kbps of connection last night when I tried to connect. :) Connection is good for browsing purposes, accessing international sites sometimes can be a bit slow, but I believe this is more to infrastructure issue on the ISP's connection to the global Internet rather than issue on the HSDPA connection itself. Accessing local Indonesian sites is very fast.

Unfortunately, IM2 Broom only provides data connection without any voice capability, while I also need a local Indonesian number for normal voice calls, to save the roaming charges. I might be getting a Telkomsel's Simpati line today, so that I can also use its Telkomsel Flash feature for ad-hoc Internet connections for my phone. I won't be using my SingTel line for HSDPA connection here in Indonesia, the data roaming charges are very expensive.

Other than Jakarta, I'll also be visiting my hometown Bandung (of course) and Garut (Cipanas, to be exact) for a short holiday, before going to Tasikmalaya to celebrate Hari Raya Idul Adha (Hari Raya Haji) with my family and relatives there.

Happy National Blogger Day and Happy Deepavali

27 October 2008 is the first anniversary of Indonesia's National Blogger Day. Therefore, I would like to wish all Indonesian bloggers a very happy National Blogger Day.

And since this very same day is also a Diwali day (which is a public holiday here in Singapore), I also would like to wish a very Happy Deepavali to all my Indian friends who celebrate the festival of lights.

Gelanggang Samudra, Ancol

This article is originally posted on ABN's Asia Travel Blog here.

 

Gelanggang Samudra is an animal-based theme park, which is one of the attractions at the Taman Impian Jaya Ancol recreation park located in Jakarta, Indonesia. Ancol itself is a popular recreation park among Indonesians, located within the shore of the Jakarta bay, north of the city. However, being an aging attraction, it seems that Gelanggang Samudra is not as popular as other attractions such as the Sea World, which is located next to Gelanggang Samudra, the Atlantis Water Adventure and the more thrilling Dunia Fantasi.

For me, I found out that the Gelanggang Samudra is more educative to the kids. There are three animal shows, namely dolphin show, sealion show and other various animals show, staged several times a day, and each show is being conducted at different times, to ensure that we can attend all the three shows at the shortest time possible. There's also one 4D show which we can attend, and the kids also can have unlimited access to some rides, such as bumper car and balloon ride.

The MCs and the trainers of the animals who are staging the shows are also very professional in bringing up the shows with some jokes here and there. However, the shows were being presented in bahasa Indonesia, so foreign tourists might have difficulties in understanding them although they can still enjoy the animals' talents and capabilities during the show. That might be the reason why this attraction might still be appealing for domestic tourists, but not for foreign tourists.

On top of Ancol's entrance fee (12,000 rupiahs per person and 12,000 rupiahs per car), we needed to pay the Gelanggang Samudra's entrance fee of 60,000 rupiahs per person. That would set you back around 72,000 rupiahs (around SGD $10 or USD $7.79) per person, which is quite reasonable. The best way to reach Ancol is to drive your own car or take a cab. Alternatively, you can also take the TransJakarta busway.

More pictures can be found here.

Quicklink: Another Jakarta-Bandung Travelogue by Rush Murad

(Pictures taken from the article)

Being involved in a accident last year -- while the car he was taking had the brakes failed when cruising down the steep slope of Mount Tangkuban Perahu -- does not prevent Rush Murad, a Malaysian traveler and blogger, from again choosing Jakarta and -- especially -- Bandung, for his holiday destinations. He revisited both cities recently and again, he wrote a nice travelogue about his journey, in Malay. The travelogue can be found here.

Again, thanks for writing such a nice travelogue and helping to promote our country's (and especially, my home town's) tourist attractions.