I'm just starting with Heroku, and I'm considering using it to host my app.
The problem is, I'm planning to build my app with a micro services architecture.
As I understand Heroku's pricing, they charge per dyno. When using micro services, there are a bunch of "apps" or "services" working together to provide the functionality of one app.
It seems inevitable to do this without using multiple dynos, and by adding dynos, the price goes up very quickly.
I have three questions:
Is my interpretation of Heroku's pricing correct?
Is there a better way to do a micro services architecture using Heroku?
Or, is there a way to deploy multiple docker containers on a single dyno?
Your Heroku costs will definitely go up as you use more dynos and more apps, but if you are just starting out, the money you spend will be in no way more than the time you would spend setting up something like AWS to perform the same functionality.
You can always save money later, once your app is running and users are loving it. If you goal is to prototype and get it out fast, Heroku is still the best choice.
Did you know about Heroku price calculator?
Saw you run 10*1x dynos, plus some other services, like text messages and such. That will cost you $250-350 this month. That's a lot, sure. But you can get your app running tomorrow, and presumably that is worth a lot more than 250.
I've visited Google Cloud full day "training" and I still don't get if there is any REAL advantage in using it for my Laravel applications.
Currently I'm using a VPS server from local hosting provider, and I can deploy a laravel application in 5 ssh commands. In few minutes it becomes live.
I've searched through options on how to do it on GoogleCloud. All of them are for minimum 2 hours of tedious reading/clicking and none offers deploying straight from a git repository, thus no continuous integration.
Please help me understand what is the advantage of paying 5 times more and configuring 20 times longer in GoogleCloud versus VPS?
Thx
It all depends on what you try to achieve by deploying your Laravel app. If you expect little traffic and of a constant nature, you local hosting provider is fine. Do you expect your app to scale for millions of requests per second? Would you value resilience? In this case, you are better off doing a little extra effort and deploying in the cloud. You may gather more detail from the "Building Scalable and Resilient Web Applications on Google Cloud Platform" online document.
I understand that the Amazon EC2 SLA says that EC2 guarantees a 99.95% uptime.
I've read in many places that systems built using EC2 should be designed to cope with individual instances being restarted e.g. ec2 rebooted my instance.
Where is the official Amazon documentation to say that instances may be restarted?
I do not believe Amazon publishes any documentation on rebooting EC2 instances for hardware changes. Instead, they will send customers a notice if there is going to be scheduled maintenance performed on the system. However, I think the issue here is more a matter of servers crashing unexpectedly. That, of course, they cannot announce beforehand. Also, don't forget that they calculate their uptime based upon 5 minute increments so you may have downtime that isn't counted towards their SLA because it was less than the five minutes and didn't get noticed.
Here is a link to the official Amazon EC2 SLA (I'm sure you've seen it). They don't give any indication that maintenance ever affects systems running in production:
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2-sla/
You can contrast this with Amazon RDS, which specifically states what maintenance is and when it occurs:
http://aws.amazon.com/rds/faqs/#12
I would imagine that they expect to never have downtime because of hardware upgrades. Since everything is virtual, they can move live instances to new hardware without taking them down.
If I have a website, hosted with a standard hosting company, and I would like to move it to a Dedicated machine, maybe EC2, is there a way to compare my current traffic to usage of a cloud machine?
Hosting companies gives you plan measured in Bandwith/Space while EC2 in usage time.
So I'm looking for a way to predict machine usage time based on my current traffic data for costs evaluation.
Thanx!
I'm not sure you're understanding usage time correctly. For your website to exist on EC2, you'll need to create one or more instances depending on the architecture you use. This is the same as a dedicated hosting setup elsewhere except with cloud instances.
The difference lies with billing. Where a traditional hosting company will charge you monthly, EC2 charges you per instance hour, or every hour you have an instance running. Therefore, for hosting a website, you'll have the server running 24/7 which will equate to roughly 720 hrs a month charged at a few cents per hour.
The key thing to work out is how many/what size instances you'll need to run your site at the equivalent performance you're seeing now, and that's only something you'll figure out with testing.
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I have thought a lot recently about the different hosting types that are available out there. We can get pretty decent latency (average) from an EC2 instance in Europe (we're situated in Sweden) and the cost is pretty good. Obviously, the possibility of scaling up and down instances is amazing for us that's in a really expansive phase right now.
From a logical perspective, I also believe that Amazon probably can provide better availability and stability than most hosting companies on the market. Probably it will also outweigh the need of having a phone number to dial when we wonder anything and force us to google the things by ourselves :)
So, what should we be concerned about if we were about to run our web server on EC2? What are the pro's and cons?
To clarify, we will run a pretty standard LAMP configuration with memcached added probably.
Thanks
So, what should we be concerned about if we were about to run our web server on EC2? What are the pro's and cons?
The pros and cons of EC2 are somewhat dependent on your business. Below is a list of issues that I believe affect large organizations:
Separation of duties Your existing company probably has separate networking and server operations teams. With EC2 it may be difficult to separate these concerns. ie. The guy defining your Security Groups (firewall) is probably the same person who can spin up servers.
Home access to your servers Corporate environments are usually administered on-premise or through a Virtual Private Network (VPN) with two-factor authentication. Administrators with access to your EC2 control panel can likely make changes to your environment from home. Note further that your EC2 access keys/accounts may remain available to people who leave or get fired from your company, making home access an even bigger problem...
Difficulty in validating security Some security controls may inadvertently become weak. Within your premises you can be 99% certain that all servers are behind a firewall that restricts any admin access from outside your premises. When you're in the cloud it's a lot more difficult to ensure such controls are in place for all your systems.
Appliances and specialized tools do not go in the cloud Specialized tools cannot go into the cloud. This may impact your security posture. For example, you may have some sort of network intrusion detection appliances sitting in front of on-premise servers, and you will not be able to move these into the cloud.
Legislation and Regulations I am not sure about regulations in your country, but you should be aware of cross-border issues. For example, running European systems on American EC2 soil may open your up to Patriot Act regulations. If you're dealing with credit card numbers or personally identifiable information then you may also have various issues to deal with if infrastructure is outside of your organization.
Organizational processes Who has access to EC2 and what can they do? Can someone spin up an Extra Large machine and install their own software? (Side note: Our company http://LabSlice.com actually adds policies to stop this from happening). How do you backup and restore data? Will you start replicating processes within your company simply because you've got a separate cloud infrastructure?
Auditing challenges Any auditing activities that you normally undertake may be complicated if data is in the cloud. A good example is PCI -- Can you actually always prove data is within your control if it's hosted outside of your environment somewhere in the ether?
Public/private connectivity is a challenge Do you ever need to mix data between your public and private environments? It can become a challenge to send data between these two environments, and to do so securely.
Monitoring and logging You will likely have central systems monitoring your internal environment and collecting logs from your servers. Will you be able to achieve the monitoring and log collection activities if you run servers off-premise?
Penetration testing Some companies run periodic penetration testing activities directly on public infrastructure. I may be mistaken, but I think that running pen testing against Amazon infrastructure is against their contract (which make sense, as they would only see public hacking activity against infrastructure they own).
I believe that EC2 is definitely a good idea for small/medium businesses. They are rarely encumbered by the above issues, and usually Amazon can offer better services than an SMB could achieve themselves. For large organizations EC2 can obviously raise some concerns and issues that are not easily dealt with.
Simon # http://blog.LabSlice.com
The main negative is that you are fully responsible for ALL server administration. Such as : Security patches, Firewall, Backup, server configuration and optimization.
Amazon will not provide you with any OS or higher level support.
If you would be FULLY comfortable running your own hardware then it can be a great cost savings.
i work in a company and we are hosting with amazon ec2, we are running one high cpu instance and two small instances.
i won't say amazon ec2 is good or bad but just will give you a list of experiences of time
reliability: bad. they have a lot of outages. only segments mostly but yeah...
cost: expensive. its cloud computing and not server hosting! a friend works in a company and they do complex calculations that every day have to be finished at a certain time sharp and the calculation time depends on the amount of data they get... they run some servers themselves and if it gets scarce, they kick in a bunch of ec2's.
thats the perfect use case but if you run a server 24/7 anways, you are better of with a dedicated rootserver
a dedicated root server will give you as well better performance. e.g. disk reads will be faster as it has a local disk!
traffic is expensive too
support: good and fast and flexible, thats definately very ok.
we had a big launch of a product and had a lot of press stuff going on and there were problems with the reverse dns for email sending. the amazon guys got them set up all ripe conform and nice in not time.
amazon s3 hosting service is nice too, if you need it
in europe i would suggest going for a german hosting provider, they have very good connectivity as well.
for example here:
http://www.hetzner.de/de/hosting/produkte_rootserver/eq4/
http://www.ovh.de/produkte/superplan_mini.xml
http://www.server4you.de/root-server/server-details.php?products=0
http://www.hosteurope.de/produkt/Dedicated-Server-Linux-L
http://www.klein-edv.de/rootserver.php
i have hosted with all of them and made good experiences. the best was definately hosteurope, but they are a bit more expensive.
i ran a CDN and had like 40 servers for two years there and never experienced ANY outage on ANY of them.
amazon had 3 outages in the last two months on our segments.
One minus that forced me to move away from Amazon EC2:
spamhaus.org lists whole Amazon EC2 block on the Policy Block List (PBL)
This means that all mail servers using spamhaus.org will report "blocked using zen.dnsbl" in your /var/log/mail.info when sending email.
The server I run uses email to register and reset passwords for users; this does not work any more.
Read more about it at Spamhaus: http://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/query/PBL361340
Summary: Need to send email? Do not use Amazon EC2.
The other con no one has mentioned:
With a stock EC2 server, if an instance goes down, it "goes away." Any information on the local disk is gone, and gone forever. You have the added responsibility of ensuring that any information you want to survive a server restart is persisted off of the EC2 instance (into S3, RDS, EBS, or some other off-server service).
I haven't tried Amazon EC2 in production, but I understand the appeal of it. My main issue with EC2 is that while it does provide a great and affordable way to move all the blinking lights in your server room to the cloud, they don't provide you with a higher level architecture to scale your application as demand increases. That is all left to you to figure out on your own.
This is not an issue for more experienced shops that can maintain all the needed infrastructure by themselves, but I think smaller shops are better served by something more along the lines of Microsoft's Azure or Google's AppEngine: Platforms that enforce constraints on your architecture in return for one-click scalability when you need it.
And I think the importance of quality support cannot be underestimated. Look at the BitBucket blog. It seems that for a while there every other post was about the downtime they had and the long hours it took for Amazon to get back to them with a resolution to their issues.
Compare that to Github, which uses the Rackspace cloud hosting service. I don't use Github, but I understand that they also have their share of downtime. Yet it doesn't seem that any of that downtime is attributed to Rackspace's slow customer support.
Two big pluses come to mind:
1) Cost - With Amazon EC2 you only pay for what you use and the prices are hard to beat. Being able to scale up quickly to meet demands and then later scale down and "return" the unneeded capacity is a huge win depending on your needs / use case.
2) Integration with other Amazon web services - this advantage is often overlooked. Having integration with Amazon SimpleDB or Amazon Relational Data Store means that your data can live separate from the computing power that EC2 provides. This is a huge win that sets EC2 apart from others.
Amazon cloud monitoring service and support is charged extra - the first one is quite useful and you should consider that and the second one too if your app is mission critical.