Code Trials

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.

Like many companies every year Digital Cheetah holds a Holiday Party. We have two events that make our Holiday Party special to us: I perform a magic show and we have a spirited gift exchange. Along with music, food, and drink the evening is always very well received and it is talked about long after the event.

It takes a lot of planning and effort to pull this event off each year, but it is always worth it as the party brings us closer together as a company and gives our employees something to look forward to. When you think about your own Holiday Party think about going the extra mile, you'll enjoy it more and your employees will too. And in the end that is really what counts.

Here is where I attempt to cut the head off of Digital Cheetah's President: Aj Tidwell. Enjoy!

I've been busy working on the Digital Cheetah Cloud Platform for a few months now and although my early work was focusing on Amazon EC2, it has become clear that there are lots of choices. I now have various cloud projects running at:

• Rackspace Cloud
• Amazon EC2
• Linode Cloud
• GigeNet Cloud
• CoreNAP

I'm primarily working with very small cloud instances (256-512 MB) and although each vendor has various benefits, based on: performance, reliability, price and simplicity I currently plan on using Rackspace for most of our cloud servers.  Things could change over the next 12 months, in fact I'm sure they will, but today Rackspace are the clear choice for what we are looking for.

Well it has been over eight years since Digital Cheetah has changed it's website. We build websites for a living, so there really is no excuse - we were just too busy to get to it ...

But now it is live and I'm very happy with it. If only I could update this blog more often then everything would be right with the world! Check out our new site here: digitalcheetah.com.