| Posted by tumble, 09-19-2010, 04:22 PM | |
I have been reading up on the cloud concept. And have gone as far as to contact OnApp.
Reading thru some other threads I saw this statment:
Is the above a true statment?
My customers love those off the shelf/automatic install via Fantastico/installtron options.
Then I start reading about the hits to read/write operations because they are laying outside of the local storage area. Read/Write operations are very important to my customers and our current server lineup proves this out with SAS drives raid10 type systems ect.
I do not host mega busy sites driven by mysql/php. Small sites with maybe 100 users online at a time. And the far majority would not consider using a VPS. This does not mean that I would not want to offer VPS services.
This move would be a costly adventure for me. As I would have to buy a few items to complete the cloud(according to OnApp suggestions).
Is it really worth it?
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| Posted by Caroline_9429, 09-20-2010, 09:46 AM | |
You can use OnApp for shared hosting.
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| Posted by CRego3D, 09-20-2010, 10:45 AM | |
tumble
I do not know the circumstance the post you refereed to was, but I can assure you on a cloud that utilises proper PV, like Xen that is not the case, it functions just like a dedicated server and you have access to all the resources allocated to the VM.
I know of quite a few shared hosts running their cpanel servers on the cloud now, works great.
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| Posted by kris1351, 09-20-2010, 12:06 PM | |
The Cloud platform is excellent for shared honestly. If you setup a good SAN with Raid10 and have the right bandwidth to them you can have very good disk IO and provide a very quick solution. Plus if you have the hardware you can do maintenance on servers without effecting the platform, that was the appeal for us.
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| Posted by dazmanultra, 09-21-2010, 04:33 AM | |
Only a badly set up or incredibly over-sold cloud will have performance issues. I/O is a big issue in a cloud environment, performance can be better or worse than local storage/traditional hosting technologies but it's all in the implementation (and management).
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| Posted by bvsonline, 09-21-2010, 06:34 AM | |
The Cloud environment is very much suitable for your requirement.The Fantastico/installtron options runs very good in Cloud platform.Even Cpanel runs fine in each Cloud appliance (application) which has Fantastico/Installtron.
You need to opt for the good Cloud provider who has technically skilled support in Cloud platform.
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| Posted by lostmind, 09-21-2010, 09:33 AM | |
That's my quote.
My meaning was that these applications will not scale past a single physical node in the "cloud" without some serious work. Work which, imho; your average webmaster is incapable of handling. Also, the "cloud" as delivered by most vendors today, has some pretty terrible IO/disk performance and to get around these problems, people are told to use memcache or leave more ram to let linux do file cacheing, or fire up a second "cloud" to proxy pages, etc. Which is a joke, customers are basically being told to overprovision as if it was a good thing.
Of course, these same applications won't scale past a single dedicated server outside the cloud without the same amount of work. I was pointing out that just because a website is powered by the "cloud", it doesn't make it magically scale or magically run faster/better/whatever.
Last edited by lostmind; 09-21-2010 at 09:38 AM.
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| Posted by JasonD10, 09-21-2010, 10:16 AM | |
Why would those simple web applications have any problems scaling past one server? They are not some custom web server daemon they can use basic software like Linux, Apache, PHP, and MySQL. Simple LAMP stacks can and do scale to multiple servers requiring absolutely no modification, tweaking, or performance issues on a proper Cloud setup. We have been doing it a long time now, and frankly we see far better performance than any one traditional server could provide.
None of the "Cloud" work is done at the "webmaster" level, it is done at an engineering level far above that of the web application itself so that isn't right either.
IO is not an issue on any properly designed Cloud, and actually some are built with significantly better IO. We're building a cloud right now with Intel X25-E's and needless to say, it flies. Next, add the advanced caching algorithms we use and you have a true beast of IO capabilities.
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| Posted by Winky, 09-21-2010, 06:23 PM | |
Those off the shelf softwares run great on our cloud servers. Not sure what the guy is talking about when he says you have to hire a 3rd party developer to get setup.
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| Posted by lostmind, 09-21-2010, 07:16 PM | |
With Applogic, it may be that what you say is true. Although from what I see, most Applogic cloud providers don't offer their "Applogic cloud" as a scalable LAMP application with the funky SLA ctl application but just as a virtual dedicated server application aka plain VPS that can't scale past one physical node - I may be wrong there though, I've only been testing Applogic for *very* short time.
My points are valid for the majority of cloud providers out there, Applogic providers may be the exception (although a quick bonnie on my Applogic grid virtual dedicated server appliance shows crummy performance, maybe there's some stuff - aka "advanced caching algorithms" that we've still not found).
Anyways, on the average cloud out there, simple LAMP app's DO NOT SCALE. The average cloud out there is simply a VPS with different billing cycles and maybe an API or some built in redundancy - but they don't scale the cloud instances automagically by adding/removing resources from your glorified VPS... unless you use that API, but then my other point is that most webmasters don't even understand what an API is. Even then, if you do use the API to scale your instance, you still can't scale past a single physical node without doing some serious admin work. And yes, some clouds perform better than others - not all clouds are equal, that's for damned sure.
Too many "clouds" out there are simply old products rebranded to take advantage of the cloud craze.
I've moved several clients from other company "clouds" to dedicated servers and saved them tons of money and made their sites perform much better thanks to better hardware and no visualization overhead. When you can get 2 servers, each with dual quad core xeons, 24gb ram, intel ssd's and tb's of bandwidth for about a third of the price that your average cloud vendor will charge for similar specs... it's kind of a no brainer right now.
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| Posted by lostmind, 09-21-2010, 07:44 PM | |
/sigh.
Read my message, they install fine, same as a dedicated server.
My problem with the cloud marketing is that everyone claims it will scale and solve all client problems. Reality is much different.
Magento on a 1gb 1vcpu "average cloud instance" gets hit with a batch of traffic. It's not suddenly going to scale on its own to 4gb ram and 4vcpu's to handle the traffic spike. If the traffic spike is even larger than that, it's not going to say - hey, let's throw mysql onto this physical node, give it all the resources with say 8 cpu cores, 16gb ram, bunch of disk, then setup a webserver proxy on this node here with 4 cpu cores, 4gb ram, bunch of disk plus let's scale the current node up to 8 cpu's, 16gb ram and a bunch of disks, then setup memcache and tell everything that mysql running on a different instance, etc etc etc all magically behind the scene's without any human intervention.
But that's what clients believe, until their magento shop does get busy and can't scale past a single physical node and their hosting bills are getting pricey and suddenly they are told they need to hire a 3rd party dev team to scale their site across several cloud instances or pay their host extra to configure the setup, etc.
I'm just tired of people promoting "cloud" as a way to survive the /. effect like it's some magical pill. If you get dugg on your little cloud instance, your site will likely go down. Same as if you were running your site on a little dedicated server of similar specs and paying a bunch less money each month.
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| Posted by JasonD10, 09-21-2010, 08:17 PM | |
It's not really fair to assume what a provider is or isn't doing when you don't know first hand. As you can see yourself though, it is very much technically possible to scale a standard LAMP application beyond one single server. Even without the sla appliance you are still able to scale a LAMP application beyond one physical server. However, for argument sake this can all be done both in and out of Cloud as we've been doing it for 12 years, obviously only recently have I personally started doing it with Cloud. Cloud has made it an administrator's dream as it's done much easier, and we're no longer "wasting" so many resources with dedicated servers needing so many independent tasks.
For example, one install I'm working on is going from 28 servers (non-cloud) to 12 (cloud) right now. We have quite a few applications running and various "roles" of those 28 servers and as stand-alone use servers with high available and redundancy, that's how many we needed to achieve their goal with a little room to grow. Now, we're cutting back to less than the servers, half the rack space, identical hardware across the line instead of tons of different hardware forcing us to keep spare's of a lot of different components, and it's an administrator's pleasure. HA, redundancy, (true) scalability, ease of use (scale, backup, restore, develop, deploy, virtualized environments with no need of KVM or console access), and various other benefits are definitely there.
I just got back from the Tier1 Hosting & Cloud Summit in Vegas and listened to experts in the field talk about the growth and effect of Cloud in the market. We're not really talking about $5 websites as the "market" but companies that are more like my larger customers that have multi-server environments. Cloud is here, it's growing rapidly, and it will only grow much bigger in the future. One of the bigger problems is it's not understood properly by.. well.. just about everyone from business operators, investors, webmasters, engineers, etc.
If Cloud was all "fluff" I wouldn't have jumped on the bandwagon as I've seen many fads come and go through the years. My customer base is mostly much older as Cloud Web is just one small brand of our business. But as primarily a Managed Hosting provider I can certainly say this is exactly what I've been looking for, and is by far the most influential and most powerful advancement I've seen in my 12 years next to the much needed adoption of wireless technology advancements. Virtualization was huge, and Cloud is just "virtualization 2.0 on steroids" if you will. As we're migrating customers away from stand-alone infrastructure's we're not looking back.
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| Posted by lostmind, 09-21-2010, 08:38 PM | |
I won't argue that Applogic can't do this, as it obviously can. I will argue that Applogic is not the de facto standard because there isn't one. I will also argue that all of the companies advertising cloud on WHT I have had experience with had/have very poor performing, over priced cloud products that do not scale the way you describe.
I'll call the current cloud fad as marketing on steroids. At least, the current and popular cloud implementations are.
I'd like to believe that a properly deployed Applogic solution can do all of this and more as we're a fully managed provider who is looking for exactly what you've described.
I think we've come a bit off track of the thread though. I'd say my impression of Onapp is that it is VPS on steroids. It's pretty, easy to integrate, easy to setup and affordable. With a bit of work on the infrastructure I'm sure you can make it perform fairly well.
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| Posted by lostmind, 09-22-2010, 12:12 AM | |
Nice to see I'm not the only one who has experienced this....
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| Posted by brentpresley, 09-22-2010, 05:13 PM | |
You are correct in this. Applogic CAN scale LAMP very well past one physical node, but most Applogic providers do not offer this. I believe this is because not many customers out there are using more than the resources of one node, so most providers are more familiar with a VDS/VPS that takes up a whole node, than LAMP configuration.
And you are right, cloud is the buzzword right now. You really have to read what people offer, because one company's cloud is very different from another company's.
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