Brightbox announces easy to use cloud load balancers | Hacker News Reader

Brightbox announces easy to use cloud load balancers

blog.brightbox.co.uk

19 pointsthehodge11 comments

I love the speed you can get stuff done compared to EC2.

I'm curious, what stuff are you talking about? Admittedly, ELB's cname restriction is a little of a downer but you could always spin up an instance to act as your own LB. Also, their 3rd point of needing to rebuild an ELB is a little of a drag but it is very trivial to rebuild by hand, even faster if you have scripted it.

Moving EC2 elastic IPs can take a while in my experience, and also time for creating servers can be unpredictable. With the BrightBox stuff "Load Balancers are normally created and handling traffic within 90 seconds.", also the video here http://blog.brightbox.co.uk/posts/announcing-brightbox-cloud... seems to show server booting and ip assigning as pretty snappy. If they can maintain this responsiveness in the face of lots of production usage then it would be a good selling point.

"but it is very trivial to rebuild by hand, even faster if you have scripted it"

trouble is, anything that is trivial by hand for you, after you've done it 20 times is tricky for Sys Admins to pick up. And if you script it, when an automated solution is already available, you could be using that time to build business logic, which I'm guessing the main point of most people's role here?

We've been using them with pizzapowered.com stuff for a while whilst they are tested internally and we've found it really simple to use

I wonder about latency issues - how much is added by the typical LB setup in this case?

Patrick - negligible, it's all on the same network.

[Disclosure: I'm co-founder at Brightbox]

I think I'm detecting a trend.

Take an open source project (LVS perhaps, in this case?), scale it onto a bunch of servers running Xen (your own, Amazon's, doesn't really matter), wrap an API around it, and you've got the next cloud service.

As DevOps becomes more popular, IT becomes more sophisticated or developers care more about the system beyond their application code, I think we will see greater appreciation of the interplay between networking, systems, operations design and application design.

Particularly, I hope to see some innovation in layer 6 and 7 load balancing and routing (and growing cultural awareness of the opportunities such things could provide.)

@tastybites: a /little/ bit more to it than that ;) we do run the loadbalancing layer across multiple locations which is non-trivial.

[Disclosure: I'm co-founder at Brightbox]

As always, the devil's in the details. I wasn't being snarky - it's actually a great way of doing it since you're leveraging so much existing work. I'm also working on project that could be described in the same way.

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