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?
Related
My understanding of a CDN (like Akamai or Limelight) is that they are heavy-duty caching services.
I also understand that they are very expensive. So I'm wondering why I can't just create my own cluster of replicated caching servers (using, say, EhCache or Memcached) for all my web app's caching needs (images, URL hits/responses, Javascripts, etc) and basically get the same thing?
In essence, from a developer's perspective, what are the benefits (technical or otherwise) of paying a CDN vs. just using your own caching solution? Or, if I have completely misunderstood what CDNs are, please correct my understanding! Thanks in advance!
The key to this is the N in CDN, Content Delivery Network.
The advantage of a CDN (a good one, at least) is that it's geographically distributed. What the big CDN providers do (the ones you mentioned along with others) is have hundreds or thousands of servers in facilities all over the world. This lets what ever resource the CDN is serving sit as geographically close as possible to the end user no matter where they are in the world.
You can certainly replicate the functionality. At a very basic level most CDN's are simply an object/value store which plenty of software can do - what you can't do, at the scale these guys do it at any rate, is have servers all over the world to serve and replicate these objects.
If all you're interested in is an efficient way to store and serve static files then an object store coupled with something like nginx would do just fine. A CDN is used to make sites load as fast as they possibly can, but they come at a price.
For the record, Amazon's Cloud Front, while not as distributed as Limelight or Akamai is a lot cheaper and a good middle ground compromise on cost vs service.
The advantage of big CDNs is that they own distributed resources all over the world, allowing them to serve the users from a servers near them. Besides caching, this is the major point that makes them fast.
To build your own CDN, you would have to install servers on multiple continents, arrange good Internet connectivity for them, setup caching and make sure you have the servers all synchronized. It's not impossible to do that, but it will be very cost-intensive and might not be profitable.
With all due respect, I disagree with the other two answers given thus far to this question. Just to be clear, I'm not saying they are wrong, I'm just offering a different perspective.
While it is certainly true that the key to CDN performance is the "N," as Bulk eloquently explained, that doesn't mean you can't build your own CDN. The question is whether or not it's worth the time (and by definition, the money).
We live in a world of cheap servers and even cheaper virtual machines. Sure the big CDN networks have thousands/millions of servers all over the world, but that's because they have thousands/millions of sites to serve. Depending on the size of your site/app, all you really need in terms of resources is as much as your site(s) need. If you're small, the minimum might be a VPS on each US coasts, one in Europe, maybe two in Asia, and one in Australia. Sure, the hardware costs are too high for your typical homepage, but they are certainly not extreme, and if you're looking at CDNs in the first place, they are probably within your budget.
To me, commercial CDN services just provide PaaS convenience, but there is nothing preventing you from getting IaaS and building up your own platform.
One more thing on this topic:
I once read a comment either by David Heinemeier Hansson (the creator of Ruby on Rails) or by someone referring to him that went something along the lines of: The owner(s) of 37 Signals were concerned DHH was using Ruby to build their application. At that point Ruby was still very obscure. Almost all web hosts were offering PHP, Perl, and Microsoft technologies. When asked about the fact that there were only a handful of Ruby hosts in the world, DHH asked, "well how many do you need?"
To me the point is you need to look at what's best for your needs and the needs of your application, and not necessarily what the guys with millions of servers think.
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Closed 10 years ago.
Our company is considering moving from hosting our own servers to EC2 and I was wondering if this was a good idea.
I have seen a lot of stuff about can cloud computing (and specifically EC2) do x, or can it do y, but my real question is why would you NOT want to use it?
If you were setting up a business, what are the reasons (outside of cost) that you would choose to go through the trouble of managing your own servers?
I know there are a lot of cost calculations you can put in regarding bandwidth, disk usage etc, but there are of course, other costs regarding maintenance of your own server. For the sake of this discussion I am willing to consider the costs roughly equal.
I seem to remember that Joel Spolsky wrote a little blur on this at one time, but I was unable to find it.
Anyone have any reasons?
Thanks!
I can think of several reasons why not use EC2 (and I am talking about EC2, not grid comp in general):
Reliability: Amazon makes no guarantee as to the availability / down time / safety of EC2
Security: Amazon does not makes any guarantee as to whom it will disclose your data
Persistence: ensuring persistence of your data (that includes, effort to set up the system) is complicated over EC2
Management: there are very few integrated management tools for a cloud deployed on EC2
Network: the virtual network that allows EC2 instances to communicates has some quite painful limitations (latency, no multicast, arbitrary topological location)
And to finish that:
Cost: on the long run, if you are not using EC2 to absorb peak traffic, it is going to be much more costly than investing into your own servers (cheapo servers like Supermicro cost just a couple of hundred bucks...)
On the other side, I still think EC2 is a great way to soak up non-sensitive peak traffic, if your architecture allows it.
Some questions to ask:
What is the expected uptime, and how does downtime affect your business? What sort of service level agreement can you get, what are the penalties for missing it, and how confident are you that the SLA uptime goals will be met? (They may be better or worse at keeping the systems up than you are.)
How sensitive is the data you're proposing to put into the cloud? Again, we get into the questions of how secure the provider promises to be, what the contractual penalties and indemnities are, and how confident you are that the provider will live up to the agreement. Further, there may be external requirements. If you deal with health-related data in the US, you are subject to very strict requirements. If you deal with credit card data, you also have responsibilities (contractual, not legal).
How easy will it be to back out of the arrangement, should service not be what was expected, or if you find a better deal elsewhere? This includes not only getting your data back, but also some version of the applications you've been using. Consider the possibilities of your provider going bankrupt (Amazon isn't going to go bankrupt any time soon, but they could split off a cloud provider which could then go bankrupt), or having an internal reorganization. Bear in mind that a company in serious trouble may not be able to live up to your expectations of service.
How much independence are you going to have? Are you going to be running their software or software you pick? How easy will it be to reconfigure?
What is the pricing scheme? Is it possible for the bills to hit unacceptable levels without adequate warning?
What is the disaster plan? Ideally, it's running your software on servers in a different location from where the disaster hit.
What does your legal department (or retained corporate attorney) think of the contract? Is there a dispute resolution mechanism, and, if so, is it fair to you?
Finally, what do you expect to get out of moving to the cloud? What are you willing to pay? What can you compromise on, and what do you need?
Highly sensitive data might be better to control yourself. And there's legislation; some privacy sensitive information, for example, might not leave the the country.
Also, except for Microsoft Azure in combination with SDS, the data stores tend to be not relational, which is a nuisance in certain cases.
Maybe concern that that big a company will more likely be approached by an Agent Smith from the government to spy on everyone that a little small provider somewhere.
Big company - more customers - more data to aggregate and recognize patterns - more resources to organize a sophisticated watch system.
Maybe it's more of a fantasy but who ever knows?
If you don't have a paranoia it doesn't mean yet that you are not being watched.
The big one is: if Amazon goes down, there's nothing you can do to bring it back up.
I'm not talking about doomsday scenarios where the company disappears. I mean that you're at the mercy of their downtime, with little recourse of your own.
Security -- you don't know what is being done to your data
Dependency -- your business is now directly intertwined with the provider
There are different kinds of cloud computing with lots of different vendors providing it. It would make me nervous to code my apps to work with a single cloud vendor. that you specifically had to code for..amazon and Microsoft I believe you need to specifically code for that platform - maybe google too.
That said, I recently jettisoned my own dedicated servers and moved to Rackspaces Mosso Cloud platform (which have no proprietary coding necessary) and I am really, really pleased with it so far. Cut my costs in half, and performance is way better than before. My sql server databases are now running on 64Bit enterprise SQL server versions with 32G of ram - that would have cost me a fortune on my previous providers infrastructure.
As far as being out of luck when the cloud is down, that was true if my dedicated server went down - it never did, but if there was a hardware crash on my dedicated server, I am not sure it would be back on-line any quicker than rackspace could bring their cloud back up.
Lack of control.
Putting your software on someone else's cloud represents handing over some control. They might institute a file upload size limit, or memory limits which could ruin your application. A security vulnerbility in their control panel could get your site hacked.
Security issues are not relevant if your application does its own encryption. Amazon is then storing encrypted data that they have no way of decrypting.
But in addition to the uptime issues, Amazon could decide to increase their prices to whatever they want. If you're dependent on them, you'll just have to pay it.
Depends how much you trust your own infrastructure in comparison to a 3rd party cloud service. In my opinion, most businesses (at least not IT related) should choose the later.
Another thing you lose with the cloud is the ability to choose exactly what operating system you want to run. For example, the latest Fedora Linux kernel available on EC2 is FC8, and the latest Windows version is Server 2003.
Besides the issues raised regarding dependability, reliability, and cost is the issue of data ownership. When you locate data on someone else's server, you no longer control who views, accesses, modifies, or uses that data. While the cloud operators can limit your access, you possess no way of limiting theirs or limiting who they give access to. Yes, you can encrypt all the data on the server but you lack any way of knowing who possesses root access to the server itself and any means to stop others from downloading your encrypted data and cracking it open. You lose control over your data; depending on what type of apps you are running and the proprietary nature of the data involved, this could engender corporate security and/or liability risks.
The other factor to consider is what would happen to your company if Amazon and/or EC2 were to suddenly vanish overnight. While a seemingly preposterous position, it could happen. Would you be able to quickly fill the hole and restore service, or would your potentially revenue generating apps languish while the IT staff scramble to obtain servers and bandwidth to get them back online? Also, what would happen to your data? The cloud hard drive holding all your information still exists, somewhere, and could pose a potential liability risk depending on the information you stored there--items such as personal information, business transaction records etc.
If I was starting my own business now, I would go through the hassle of purchasing and maintaining my own severs so I retained data ownership. I could control root access to the hardware, as well as control who can access and modify the data.
Unanswered security questions.
Really, do you want your IP out there, where you're not the one in control of it?
Most cloud computing environment are at least partially vendor specific. There's no good way to move stuff from one cloud to another without having to do a lot of rewriting. That sort of lock-in puts you at the mercy of one vendor when it comes to downtime, price increases, etc. If you rent or own your own servers, hosting providers and colos are pretty much interchangeable. You always have the option of moving somewhere else.
This may change in the future, as these things become standardized, but for now tying yourself to the cloud means tying yourself to a specific vendor.
This is kind of like the "Why would you use Linux" comment I received from management many years ago. The response I got was that it is a solution in search of a problem.
So what are your goals and objectives in moving to EC2?
I'd be interested to know if you'd still want to move to a cloud, if it was your own.
Cloud computing has brought parallel programming a little closer to the masses, but you still have to understand how best to use it - otherwise you're going to waste compute cycles and bandwidth.
Re-architecting your application for most efficient use of a cloud computing service is non-trivial.
Besides what has already been said here, we have to consider uniformity across the business. Are all of you applications going to be hosted in the cloud, or only most? Is most enough to pull the trigger on using the cloud when you still have to have personnel to handle a few special servers?
In particular, there might be special hardware that you need to communicate with such modems to accept incoming data, or voice cards that make automated phone calls. I don't know how such things could be handled in a cloud environment.
What makes a site good for high traffic?
Does it have more to do with the hardware/infrastructure, or with how one writes the software, using Java as the example, if it matters?
I'm wondering how the software changes just because it is expected that billions of users will be on the site, if at all.
My understanding up to this point is that the code doesn't change, but that it is deployed on multiple servers, in a cluster, and a load balancer distributes the load, so really, on any one server/deployment, the application is just as any other standard application/website.
I highly recommend reading Jeff Atwood's blog on Micro-Optimization. In previous blogs he talks somewhat about how this site was created and the hardware upgrades he has had (which quickly summarized said that better hardware performs better only the extent that it is faster/better), but the real speed of a site comes from good programming, and this article seems like it should sum up some of your site programming questions quite well.
Hardware is cheap. Programming is expensive.
There are some programming techniques to make sure your code can handle multiple simultaneous views/updates. If you're using an existing framework, much of that work is (hopefully) done for you, but otherwise you're going to find stuff that worked for a few hundred hits an hour on one server isn't going to work when you're getting hundreds of thousands of hits and you have to deploy multiple load balancing machines.
Well, it is primarily an issue of hardware scaling but there are a few things to keep in mind with respect to the software involved in scaling. For example, if you are on a server farm, you'll need to work with a session management server (either via SQL Server or via a state server - which has implications in that your session variables need to be serializable).
But, in the bigger picture, there are a variety of things that you would want to do to scale to an enterprise level. For example, it becomes particularly important that you abstract out your database calls to a DAL because you may well need to adopt the use of a middleware package for high volume environments.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I'm looking for a cost effective tool for managing an web app on Ec2. Rightscale seems to the big dog and charges for it. Scalr looks like a more cost effective solution but it's hard to find out any real customer experiences..
The key aspects I'm looking for is a load balancer (http and https) and a way to automatically bring online additional web servers capacity as load increases as well as terminate the instances when load falls off.
From what I can tell, lots of people are rolling their own stuff here. We're trying to release an app and don't really want to have to fight too many heavy sys admin battles. Given the importance of performance etc I'd be grateful to hear advise and experiences from the field on this.
I am a Scalr user, a Scalr.net subscriber, and have become a Scalr enthusiast. I cannot possibly afford Rightscale.
Scalr can do what you ask.
Scalr has three images (each with 32/64 bit versions), plus a base (generic) image:
1) A load balancer image, running nginx. A highly available setup requires two of these. Scalr will manage your nameservice, and round robin between them. If one goes down, Scalr will remove it from DNS and bring up another instance. It is possible to run other load balancers, but nginx is the default.
2) Several application server images are available, running Apache/Tomcat/Rails. You setup your application here, be it PHP/Perl/Python/Java/Ruby/whatever. nginx routes requests between these instances grouped by unique user (based on IP + browser). Scalr monitors these for upness too, and replaces broken instances.
3) A MySQL database image, with automatic master/slave replication. Just deploy your schema, and Scalr handles replication and replaces defunct servers. It will also backup your data periodically. Scalr's DNS provides master and slave hostnames, so you can have your app read from the slaves and write to the master.
All of these instance types will auto-scale based on load. You start with the base image closest to what you're doing, and then you customize them for your application. For instance, we deploy our Perl/Catalyst app on the apache server instances but we serve static content from the nginx front-end servers. We had to modify our application slightly to use read/write database handles.
All in all, it took about three weeks of working through bugs in Scalr to get our application to a reliable state where I am confident that it IS highly available with Scalr. Their support was phenomenal, so the bugs didn't bother me too much, and the system is really coming along. It is approaching serious reliability.
As a side note, the best feature of Scalr is the 'Synchronize to All' feature, which auto-bundles your AMI and re-deploys it on a new instance - all without a service interruption. This saves you the time of going through the lengthy EC2 image/AMI creation process, which can otherwise make very simple admin tasks take 20 minutes. You can use this whether you are scaling your server farm or not - it would be very handy even on a single instance.
I pay Scalr.net $50 a month to host the service for me because I think it saves me time and money. The bottom line so far is this: at my last gig, we had a systems guy working on our highly available Linux DB + app server setup for a year... and he failed to achieve the kind of reliability that I achieved in three weeks. The savings by using Scalr as compared to rolling my own are extreme.
All that being said, if I could afford Rightscale, I would be using Rightscale. But the up-front fee and $500 a month make that impossible. There has been talk of waving the up-front fee in exchange for waving the consulting that it includes, but the monthly service fee isn't going anywhere.
I should mention that at the moment, sclar.net's website is down, so if I wanted to manage any of my server farms (don't have them up atm), I simply couldn't right now. It is not clear whether scaling is working for scalr.net subscribers right now, or not. Which is to say... this is perhaps not a mature solution yet. This doesn't happen often, before tonight the only downtime I've experienced were in periods of a few minutes at a time. But yeah... its down RIGHT NOW, so I must mention it :)
I would suggest a thorough reading of the support group at http://groups.google.com/group/scalr-discuss before making your decision. If you pick Scalr, be prepared to test your setup and work through any issues you have on the google group.
I will comment on your question, since giving a concrete answer is a little ambitious.
First, I see that you have haproxy on your tags. That is definitely the best load balancing software proven in EC2. There is documentation and experiences in the AWS forums on the use of haproxy.
I am unable to give you an opinion on scalr, but Rightscale is going the right direction. One of RightScale most interesting features in their roadmap is that they are a mgmt cloud system for any cloud not just EC2 of Amazon. That makes them very promising when trying to request load balancing and upscaling in need.
Also you can signup for a developer free account on rightscale and you can test some of their AMI and free scripts, they are pretty impressive.
Well, this might sound like I am working there or something, but I am a just a cloud user, no connection with them. If that crosses your mind.
I hope this helps, at least adds to the discussion.
Geo
Been on Scalr for about two months now and have slowly transitioned several production applications to the platform with good results. I strongly recommend them for quick turn around/support and value. I would like to see them improve availability of their platform.
All in all, a good fit for the original poster based on the simple use case presented.
Every service has a bad day. AWS services see down time. However, there are still users running their apps on AWS.
I have a few farms on Scalr.net and compared to Rightscale. I don't have to pay an arm and a leg.
Overall, service is very reliable. And now with the scripting engine i can setup my own scripts to govern my instances.
With Regards
Hareem Haque
Both services (rightscale and scalr) are great. The offer is not the same and the price is not the same too. But they are both what I was looking for. Regaring our budget scalr fits my needs. I found the support through a google group very strange at the beginning, but it is very fast and efficient.
Their solution is also open source (not bad) and they also have a V2 in their roadmap with support to other providers.
Wait and see, but til now, I'm very happy with it
Deciding on the right choice may not be as cut and dry as everyone expects. I have met with and heard talks from Scalr about their platform and have also listened to RightScale discuss their platform. If you have a simple SOA (App Server - Database Server - File Server), then either choice will be right for your company.
Ultimately, if you have created some custom middleware and you rely on known sockets or specific points for handshakes, you will need to consider load-balancing and auto-scaling what you can and fall back to your own solutions for what can't be managed with either of these services.
Some people say that automatic scaling won't solve the problem
I am looking into Scalr right now and although it all looks good, I decided to continue with my own scripting for the purpose of cloud management / scaling. I have 8 servers right now and am paying only the AWS fees. I use chef (self-hosted), nagios, and a lot of other tools. My databases are mysql and mongodb, load balancer is haproxy, app layer is rails. Until I need 100s of servers, I think I will just keep scriptin' ;-)
I am a broke college student. I have built a small web app in PHP5 and MySQL, and I already have a domain. What is an affordable way to get it online? A few people have suggested amazon's cloud services, but that seems equivalent to slitting my wrists and watching money slowly trickle out. So suggestions? Hosting companies, CIA drop sites, anything?
Update: A lot of suggestions have been for Dreamhost. Their plan allows for 5TB of bandwidth. Could anyone put this in perspective? For instance, how much bandwidth does a site with the kind of traffic StackOverflow get?
I say pay the 50-80 bucks for a real host. The classic "you get what you pay for" is very true for hosting. This will save you time, time you can spend getting those $80.
I use and recommend DreamHost for both their prices and customer service. I've hosted several sites here and performance has always been good. $5.95 a month for their basic package.
I highly recommend HostRocket. I have been with them for about 6 or 7 years now with multiple domains and have found uptime and database availability flawless. The only reason I'm leaving them is because I'm doing some .NET web apps now and HostRocket is purely LAMP based.
But without making things an ongoing ad. I will put in two "gotchas" that you'll want to be wary of when searching:
"Free" hosting services. Most of these will make you subdomain on them and worse, they'll put a header and a footer on your page (sometimes in gaudy frame format) that they advertise heavily on. I don't care how poor you are, this will not help attract traffic to your app.
A lot of the cheaper rates depend on pre-payment. HostRocket will give you $4.99 a month in hosting, but you have to pre-pay for 3 years. If you go month to month, it is $8.99. There are definitely advantages to the pre-payment, but you don't want to get caught with close to twice the monthly payment if you weren't expecting it.
I recently found a site called WebHostingStuff that seems to have a decent list of hosts and folks that put in their reviews. While I wouldn't consider it "the final authority" I have been using it as of late for some ideas when looking for a new host.
I hope this helps and happy hunting!
I have no specific sites to suggest, but a typical hosting company will charge you less than $10 per month for service. A simple Google search will turn up lots of results for "comparison of web hosts": http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=comparison+of+web+hosts&btnG=Google+Search
Well, Amazon EC2 is only as bad as the amount of traffic you get. So the ideal situation is to monetize your site (ads, affiliate programs, etc) so that that more traffic you get, the more you pay Amazon, but the more you make...in theory of course.
As for a budget of nothing...there's not really much you can do...hosting typically always costs something, but since you are using the LAMP stack, it's pretty cheap.
For example, hosting on GoDaddy.com for 1year can be about $50-60 which is not too bad.
I use dreamhost which costs about $80 per year, but I get MUCH more storage and bandwidth.
I agree with pix0r. With your requirements of php5 and mysql it seems that for starting out Dreamhost would be a good recommendation. You can always move it over pretty easily to ec2 if it takes off.
Dreamhost is great and cheap for a php5 mysql setup that gives you command line access. The problems come if you want to use some other web language/framework like RoR or Python/Django/Pylons. I know there are hacks to get things working, but last time I tried they were spotty at best and not supported by Dreamhost.
It may be helpful to know what kind of app we are talking about. Also what sort of traffic do you expect and to echo Adam's note what sort of business model (if any) do you have?
I've been at HostingMatters for years. They're relatively cheap, and their service is awesome. <12 hours for any support ticket I've ever had.
Additionally, since I've been with them for about ten years, they bumped me to an unmetered plan for no cost (at the same $10/month I was paying.) ....