Anyone here tried to create a cloud vps servers?

[IcEWoLF]

I have a project about creating a cloud vps server using NFo and it's multiple locations, would this be possible?

This is mainly for web hosting and not gaming of course.

[Edge100x]

Everyone means something different when they say "cloud". What does it mean in this case?

[IcEWoLF]

Everyone means something different when they say "cloud". What does it mean in this case?

A cluster of VPS servers creating a redundant Cloud VPS server for web hosting purposes.

[Edge100x]

That's still pretty vague . What are you serving up, and what layout do you have planned?

The closest thing to a plug-and-play "cloud" solution for hosting web content is a CDN, and those support only static files, such as images. For most of the hosting that our customers want to do, with dynamic content, there aren't any real "cloud" solutions and even redundancy (beyond RAID storage) is complicated and requires custom-rolled configurations.

If you're looking for redundancy and failover protection between locations, that's particularly complicated (and very rarely done, which is partially why recent outages like Amazon's East coast issue yesterday can be so potent), because syncing data is a non-trivial stumbling block.

Most companies that use the term "cloud" just mean it in terms of a workspace (VPS, or webhosting account, or storage) that the customer doesn't have to think about in terms of physical infrastructure. The client uses it and it just is hosted somewhere -- they're not involved in where or how. "Cloud" rarely indicates special redundancy or spreading one service between locations; usually a cloud-hosted service ends up tied to a single machine and connection, just like our VDSes.

[FlyingMongoose]

To simplify:

"The cloud" (as a buzzword) is also known as "the internet".

[IcEWoLF]

Thanks for clarifying this John.
BTW I hope you will eventually offer more cores for Linux only VDS servers.

[rustydusty1717]

"The Cloud" is virtualization on a new level, sort of. Essentially they are connection hundres, or thousands of machines together and renting space across the cluster. Your data is no longer on one specific machine, or drive. It's a great idea, however "The Cloud" has a ways to go before it's as nice as they make it out to be .

[Edge100x]

"The Cloud" is virtualization on a new level, sort of. Essentially they are connection hundres, or thousands of machines together and renting space across the cluster. Your data is no longer on one specific machine, or drive. It's a great idea, however "The Cloud" has a ways to go before it's as nice as they make it out to be .

The term means different things to different people, but in reference to VPSes, usually it just means that you don't know in advance what type of machine you'll be put onto, or where. Once the server is created, you'll generally stay in that spot, but you could potentially be moved later; machines in a "cloud" used for VPSes are usually loosely coupled so that "migrations" of some sort can occur, often facilitated by the use of shared (SAN, and generally pretty slow) storage.

In other words, it's what we already do, plus some potential additional uncertainty, lower performance, and potentially speedier moves between hosts. (We could easily call ours a "cloud" offering as it currently stands.)

[rustydusty1717]

That's exactly what I meant. The terms of "The Cloud" is such a broad term. In my mind, NFO resembles the cloud architecture, in a better way as far as performance. I've used high end SAN's (Whiptail) and they are extremely fast. John, do you use any SAN array's at all or is it strictly machine disks? I've seen huge success with SAN's, especially with migration among various hosts with no downtime.

[rustydusty1717]

I've only worked in environments with user bases over nothing more than 500 users, though. We mostly used VMware software for virtualization and the migration of live machines across various hosts and SAN's.

[Edge100x]

SAN performance only reaches or surpasses local storage when very fast (10 GE / fibre channel) networking is involved, and most providers use gigE (due to cost), which is why it ends up being slower. The concept is great; we're just not there yet on the hardware support.

Migration between hosts at a single location is also, thankfully, not a common need here. It only really comes up when servers are upgraded/downgraded.

[soja]

In relation to what icewolf was saying earlier, is it possible to provide a cdn-type system for game server redirect hosting? Something simple like if client is in the uk, it uses a uk based web server, in the us it uses a us based web server?

Our server for redirect usually can do over 10mbit to anyone in the us, but in the uk it goes down to <8Mb.