Cheap VM cluster (software, storage) ideas

[Ira Abramov]

Quoting Ghiora Drori, from the post of Wed, 04 Mar:
> Hi,
> Why would s3 bother you ? Its there it does not cost money if you do not use
> it it cost fairly little when you do
> and it works ok.

Well, I was told it's not accassible as a simple filesystem, which means
it won't work as shared storage for my current set of apps (various PHP
and other tools expecting to find plain files in the directories they
put them in...

> The only thing you will need s3 for is to store images of systems you want
> to launch, you could use public images
> but the cost of keeping private onse in s3 is negligible and this gives much
> more flexiblity in creating custom servers.

Well, the hosting guy has 5 very different servers hosted right now. a
winXP for Marcom, a couple of production Debian LAMPs, a test LAMP and a spare
machine for sensitive sites. I think we are talking about too many
details to try and just dump them P2V on a cloud and hope for the
best...

> You do have to learn how to handle it aka instances can die and then
> you loose their disk this has been rare lately, was more common a few
> month ago. The EBS drives however do not die with the machine so data

are you trying to cheer me up? :) I have machines with 500-600 days of
uptime here, I don't need to move a bunch of Israeli sites to a far away
cloud that occasionally has a lightning storm as well.

> You can put mysql, or any other software in images or load them when
> the instance is up.  You can run RedHat, Gentoo, Ubuntu or even
> Windows...  You can scale up and down the number of your servers and
> EBS disks as needed. 

If your servers were built for clustering in the first place, maybe.
This is not a case of "Drag'n'drop", as you can understand :)

> Make an account and play with it!!  A small machine/instance (32 bits)
> is 10 cents an hour. If you cannot afford that you are not really
> commercial :) A few minor calculations should give you the correct
> cost numbers.

10 cents an hour are $2.4 a day or about $75 a month. this is more or
less what the guy is paying in Israel now, and he gets less latency (all
Hebrew sites and wanted only by Israelis), more disk space, etc.

I guess the only real plus of histing the apps there is the Fun in the
SAN.

> As sysadmin using it in a real web company it is very good, has a
> learning curve like everything else.

yeah, only he's expecting definite answers from me, and Now I have to
talk him into doing a pilot because I don't have all the correct
answers. But that's the way the Internet works, right? :-)

Cheers,
Ira.

-- 
Santa's little helper
Ira Abramov
http://ira.abramov.org/email/