Code Trials

Until about six months ago I had not heard of Storm on Demand.  But they are a lot cheaper than even Rackspace, and their SSD Drive Servers are amazing!

Pros:

• Easy to use and intuitive interface
• Great selection of VM's up to 32 Cores and 96GB
• Great customer service
• Great Prices
• SSD Drive Servers are amazing - blindingly fast and reliable

Cons:

• Creating new VM's can be very slow
• Resizing VM's is also often slow
• Backups don't always work

Because of the speed and reliablity of their SSD Drive Servers I expect to move 90% of our clients to these servers.  It is redonkulous how good they are!

Rackspace was my early favorite although in the last six months that has changed.

Pros:

• Easy to use and intuitive interface
• Tiny VM choices down to 256MB
• Good customer service
• Good Prices

Cons:

• Resizing VM's is slow 
• Backups don't always work
• Slightly buggy VM interface
• No extra disk options at all, everything is in lockstep with RAM
• Limited choice of high-end servers (cores/RAM)

After working in the cloud for about two years I have a number of thoughts about some key vendors. Each vendor is different and there is no outright winner.

Here goes for Amazon:

Pros:

• Most advanced set of Cloud features in the industry
• Largest choice of RAM, Core, and Disk options
• Most flexibile hard disk solution (EBS)
• Pre-pay gives generous discounts (41%+)
• Fastest instance resize solution
• The one to beat

Cons:

• Zero free customer service
• Poor paid customer service
• They are still over priced
• A number of big outages over the last couple of years

After a year of working with various cloud vendors and configurations it has become clear that for many of our existing clients we will not be pursuing the One Site Per Cloud strategy. This works very well for tiny clients and large clients. But for all of the guys in between it is difficult to manage the peaks and so we're moving towards a model that uses around 8GB RAM and serves from 8-16 clients. This smooths out the traffic flows and is a little more manageable.

For our larger clients we continue to dedicate individual cloud servers to them and have see this model work very well.

I've been working on the Digital Cheetah Cloud Platform for about six months now and we're currently in the Alpha test phase. Shortly we'll begin the Beta phase that will last through May. In many traditional web site set-ups, you minimize cost by adding as many virtual sites per server as you can - sometimes 1000's of sites physically reside on a single server. Digital Cheetah typically has 10-40 sites per server. However, although this is cost-effective, it is a long way from optimal in a more virtualized world.

Thanks to competition, it is possible to get a full Cloud Server (cloud) or Virtual Machine (VM) for around $11 per month. This allows you to consider using one cloud for each site. This means we'll have 1000's of clouds eventually, but as long as our Cloud Platform can support them there are many benefits to this approach:

• Flexibility
  • You can resize the cloud according to the site's requirements.
  • You can choose specific versions of a stack per site without worrying if it clashes with other sites on the same stack.
  • You can choose a physical location close to the site.
  • You can try new software for a single site and have limited deployment until you are ready for full deployment.
• Fault Tolerance
  • Each cloud is likely to be on a different physical server so if the server dies and there is no automatic rollover, only one site goes down, instead of many.
  • It is easy to move sites around.
• Billing
  • It is easy to know precisely what a site costs you because they each have their own cloud.
  • If you group sites into logical networks or verticals (and possibly individual billing units), it becomes easy to see the cost of each vertical.
• Individual Time Zones
  • Each cloud can have the precise time zone tailored to the site.
  • By having multiple clouds in a network with different time zones it lowers the load across the network because instead of batch jobs all firing at midnight (say), midnight is now spread across multiple time zones
  • Maintenance starts during the night for each client.  Today when we fire-up a "nightly" job it could actually be running at 9pm in California when the site is still quite busy.
  • Maintenance jobs process concurrently during the night. When you have a 100 sites on a server any nightly jobs can take hours because each site is worked on sequentially. When they are distributed across multiple clouds they all finish sooner.

If you can manage the clouds automatically then it is easily the best approach for the client, and is a huge benefit of Cloud Computing.