Just looking for opinions on which deployment better is more suitable for laravel apps. We currently deploy to EC2 and have recently been looking at modernising our approach.
Discussing with the dev teams there seems to be a real divide between which technology to use. While I can see the pros and cons of each approach I am edging towards a containerized deployment as it provides a more comfortable dev environment and tech like ECS Fargate can remove a lot of the infrastructure maintenance overhead.
Serverless while it maybe quicker to scale seems to have certain limitations in terms of response size. Some of our APIs have pretty huge response bodies (a problem for another day). API Gateway also has some limitations in the timeout which I think when we are under heavy load could cause issues for us.
Does anyone recommend one deployment method over the other? What experiences have you had? Anything to keep an eye out for?
Related
Or I am really bad at searching or there is no detailed comparison between App Insights and ELK stack ?
All monitoring is going to be used for simple Web API, there going to be tons of end points but user traffic should not be too high.
So my question.. Is there any general points/differences when choosing between ELK and App Insights, personally never had a chance to set up any of those, but before setting up test environment would be nice to know in advance, what to expect/look for.
I'm from App Insights team. I think the link provided by #rickvdbosch in a comment gives quite good perspective. It is 1+ years old at this point, so, some items regarding App Insights evolved since then.
I think App Insights and ELK are quite different offerings. The former is managed offering (you can set it up within couple minutes), focused on very broad range of out-of-the-box experiences (collecting incoming/outgoing requests, exceptions, smart alerts, availability monitoring, analytics, live metrics, application map, end-to-end transactions across apps).
My understanding of ELK is that it has very powerful UI visualization and powerful dashboards (though there are adapters for Kibana to work with Azure Monitor). For scenarios where there is a need to store a lot of data (highly loaded apps with adaptive sampling still store limited amount of data) ELK solution might be cheaper to run.
Final decision was to use ELK as servers already have all the configuration, because other team uses it and mainly because logging will need a lot customization.
I like what I see and hear from Jelastic. I was wondering if Jelastic will or does support AWS' ECS or Rackspace's Carina? I am just looking for bigger names in IaaS.
Scott
I was wondering if Jelastic will or does support AWS' ECS or Rackspace's Carina?
Yes. Jelastic can be installed on your own hardware, or on almost any public cloud infrastructure - but with the caveat that you get all of the limitations of that underlying infrastructure to go with it.
Naturally my opinion on this is somewhat biased, but having some insight into the workarounds and limitations necessary to apply Jelastic concepts onto AWS, Azure, Google Cloud means it's not something I would personally recommend anyone to do.
For example one of the clear gains from using Jelastic is the substantial cost saving because you do not pay for unused resources. If you layer Jelastic on top of 3rd party infrastructure, you have a fixed cost for that infrastructure => you are paying for unused resources again.
I am just looking for bigger names in IaaS.
Jelastic recently published a blog post showing the very substantial size advantage of the Jelastic Cloud Union over what you think of as the dominant names.
In addition to having portability to migrate your workloads between different providers inside the Cloud Union, as you can see there are several providers offering multi-region directly too.
Overall you have many advantages by purchasing Jelastic service directly from an experienced and qualified provider, to give you the full benefits and capabilities of the platform - including better support and problem resolution since they have ownership of the full stack (relying on AWS or others infrastructure means you have an extra layer for finger pointing, misinformation, and delays when dealing with any issue).
Currently, I deal with microservices on a daily basis at my 9-5. Most everything that I touch is written in PHP, and as only a software engineer, SysOps manages everything that has to do with apps running, etc. I have a little familiarity in how the infrastructure and build pipeline is setup, but I still am not a SysOps or DevOps guy.
With that said, I love Golang and for a side project, I am creating a fairly large web application with a lot of moving parts. Writing and designing the code is easy as I have learned a lot from my day job, but deploying and managing Golang web apps (as they are executables) is quite different than updating files for apache to serve.
I have researched a lot on how I would build and deploy my microservice apps, but I keep on thinking of more problems that will need to be solved along the way. I have tinkered with the idea of using Docker for all of this, but I would rather not have the added complexity of learning that and managing storage for all of the images as that could be large.
Is there a best practice or a good way to manage Golang applications after they have been deployed? I would need a way to keep track of all the microservice processes to be able to see if they are still up and to be able to stop them when a new build is going to be deployed.
As for the setup, just assume that all the microservices will be run on the server, not in a container or in a VM. They will all need to be managed, but also able to act upon independently. Jenkins will be used for building and deploying. I will be using Consul for service discovery and possibly configuration, and most likely health checks on the services. I'm thinking of having each microservice register itself to consul when started and deregister when stopping.
Again, I am looking for a solution that is hopefully not just "Docker". I also had thoughts into creating a deploy service that manages the services (add and remove), as well as registering them in Consul. So if I cannot find a better solution, I might go that path. Any help is appreciated.
** Sorry if my question was confusing, but since a couple people answered on the wrong topic at hand, I will try to clarify. I don't need any help making the microservices, or even know anything about them. I brought that point up as to why I need to ask my question. Basically what I need is just the ability to manage the running go processes of all my microservices so I can do deployments and be able to stop and start processes to update the code. It is easier when you have to worry about one app, but when you can have up to 10-15 difference microservices they become harder to keep track of. After my own research, it seems that Supervisord is what I am looking for, but I'm not sure. That is the direction I am going in with this question. Thanks.
Golang is great to use for microservices, but I would say there is not so big difference of managing golang or other languages microservices.
What I would say is golang specific:
you don't need to install anything on servers since golang is compiled to single library
you can take advantage of std lib golang rpc package and gob binary decoding, instead of usin 3rd party solution (gorpc, protocol buffer etc)
Other than that you need to use your own judgement. There is plenty of ways of doing one things in microservices world; one day you will implement solution A but when after 3 month you will see that its better to do B, do that.
In internet, there is so much reading about microservices. I will recommend you 2 good resurces: https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Building_Microservices.html?id=RDl4BgAAQBAJ&source=kp_cover&redir_esc=y&hl=en
And article: http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/4/8/microservices-not-a-free-lunch.html
Remember, microservices are not a golden bullet, they often can help making application easier to maintain and grow, but from the other side require lot of additional work, consequence in specifying API contracts and strong devops culture.
Where do you get info about 'how to build scalable, high perfomance web app'? I mean architecture, best practice ets. regardless of platform and language: .net, php, java ...
Did you get your own 'epic fails' in your project and then refactor your system in a few nights or get info from internet?
Is there any communities where I could share my own expirience and get some response?
Yeah, I know that every project is individual.
You can read the High Scalability blog. If you have questions about architechture and scalability, you can always use StackOverflow unless the question is subjective.
It is not easy to answer this question. Language and Platform takes a secondary place when thinking about scalability.
"Scalability is actually a property of a system, not an individual layer of that system, infrastructure. Even with the best, sexiest, most automatic scaling layer, you can easily write code that just doesn't scale. - glyph"
How ever, you can immerse into a very good collection of resources on this issue at
http://www.royans.net/arch/library/
Just focusing on the web part of scalable web architecture, you might want to take a look at these 7 reasons why you should be using XMPP instead of AJAX especially if your web app needs to scale with lots of real-time social features.
I have been doing some catching up lately by reading about cloud hosting.
For a client that has about the same characteristics as StackOverflow (Windows stack, same amount of visitors), I need to set up a hosting environment. Stackoverflow went from renting to buying.
The question is why didn't they choose cloud hosting?
Since Stackoverflow doesn't use any weird stuff that needs to run on a dedicated server and supposedly cloud hosting is 'the' solution, why not use it?
By getting answers to this question I hope to be able to make a weighted decision myself.
I honestly do not know why SO runs like it does, on privately owned servers.
However, I can assume why a website would prefer this:
Maintainability - when things DO go wrong, you want to be hands-on on the problem, and solve it as quickly as possible, without needing to count on some third-party. Of course the downside is that you need to be available 24/7 to handle these problems.
Scalability - Cloud hosting (or any external hosting, for that matter) is very convenient for a small to medium-sized site. And most of the hosting providers today do give you the option to start small (shared hosting for example) and grow to private servers/VPN/etc... But if you truly believe you will need that extra growth space, you might want to count only on your own infrastructure.
Full Control - with your own servers, you are never bound to any restrictions or limitations a hosting service might impose on you. Run whatever you want, hog your CPU or your RAM, whatever. It's your server. Many hosting providers do not give you this freedom (unless you pay up, of course :) )
Again, this is a cost-effectiveness issue, and each business will handle it differently.
I think this might be a big reason why:
Cloud databases are typically more
limited in functionality than their
local counterparts. App Engine returns
up to 1000 results. SimpleDB times out
within 5 seconds. Joining records from
two tables in a single query breaks
databases optimized for scale. App
Engine offers specialized storage and
query types such as geographical
coordinates.
The database layer of a cloud instance
can be abstracted as a separate
best-of-breed layer within a cloud
stack but developers are most likely
to use the local solution for both its
speed and simplicity.
From Niall Kennedy
Obviously I cannot say for StackOverflow, but I have a few clients that went the "cloud hosting" route. All of which are now frantically trying to get off of the cloud.
In a lot of cases, it just isn't 100% there yet. Limitations in user tracking (passing of requestor's IP address), fluctuating performance due to other load on the cloud, and unknown usage number are just a few of the issues that have came up.
From what I've seen (and this is just based on reading various blogged stories) most of the time the dollar-costs of cloud hosting just don't work out, especially given a little bit of planning or analysis. It's only really valuable for somebody who expects highly fluctuating traffic which defies prediction, or seasonal bursts. I guess in it's infancy it's just not quite competitive enough.
IIRC Jeff and Joel said (in one of the podcasts) that they did actually run the numbers and it didn't work out cloud-favouring.
I think Jeff said in one of the Podcasts that he wanted to learn a lot of things about hosting, and generally has fun doing it. Some headaches aside (see the SO blog), I think it's a great learning experience.
Cloud computing definitely has it's advantages as many of the other answers have noted, but sometimes you just want to be able to control every bit of your server.
I looked into it once for quite a small site. Running a small Amazon instance for a year would cost around £700 + bandwidth costs + S3 storage costs. VPS hosting with similar specs and a decent bandwidth allowance chucked in is around £500. So I think cost has a lot to do with it unless you are going to have fluctuating traffic and lots of it!
I'm sure someone from SO will answer it but "Isn't just more hassle"? Old school hosting is still cheap and unless you got big scalability problems why would you do cloud hosting?