Softlayer Cloud: An operations guy's rant about really bad service
kovyrin.net
kovyrin.net
This can't possibly be a good end solution! Haven't you read everyone else's blog posts and forum comments that there's no possible way you can ever build anything as good as _insert_vendor_name_here_ has done with their cloud?
There's 0 chance that you'll be able to respond to a 2400% increase in traffic/usage in under 43 seconds! And you'll never ever be able to replicate around the globe instantly, and even if you could, it'll cost so much more than _cloud_vendor_ because they have economies of scale you can never achieve. Ever. Seriously.
I just can't believe someone would consider - you know - owning and managing hardware that they control with their own SLAs and support people in place. Where's your sense of cloudsourcing?
You don't need to be on a cloud to support that. Dedicated is so much cheaper/more powerful than typical cloud machines that you can have a surplus of machines ready for your bidding and still pay less than the cloud +end up with way more processing power.
Also, you don't need to own/mange the hardware- Hosting companies will lease it to you + repair it when things go wrong
Upvote. Sorry that there probably aren't enough people with a firm grasp on reality to lift your comment out of the hazy twilight. Take heart in knowing that the scent of coffee is getting stronger with every passing day.
I don't think that all products will have to deal with the 2400% or even a 100% increase in traffic. It really comes down to what the product is. Most products don't even reach such gains. So while there is a 0 chance they can take the increase, there is a low chance (probably under 10, maybe even under 1%) that the traffic will ever increase.
Basically: optimize later.
We had a week last month where we would lose a couple boxes a day to this issue at which point we said enough was enough and switched completely over to dedicated boxes (still from SoftLayer). Everything has been smooth sailing since.
To their credit SoftLayer (and probably more specifically our awesome account rep) stepped up and refunded us our money we spent on the CloudLayer in March (after some cajoling on my part) but their general reaction is one of a company that's completely disjointed. When I got really pissed and started bitching on twitter in March I received inbound contacts from multiple people on their sales/marketing/account mgmt team. Unfortunately these people didn't seem to be well connected to each other and are even less connected from IT (so they could empathize but not really affect change) and "management" (this faceless part of the company which seems to love to cut off it's own nose to spite it's face).
The oddest (and probably most infuriating) part of the whole thing is how everyone at SoftLayer went to great lengths not to acknowledge that the CloudLayer product had issues. They always seemed shocked by my assertion that something was very wrong with CloudLayer product and asserted that I was alone in seeing these issues. To this day I've still not read a single "we know something's wrong and we're fixing it" post from them and that's the part that bothers me the most because it implies that their either incompetent or disingenious. Neither of which are a trait you want in an infrastructure provider.
Worse: Lie. Bald-face lie.
In a rare reverse-typo, I think you actually mean "effect" there.
http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dynos (linked from http://www.heroku.com/pricing#1-0)
This could be a great opportunity for them to explain how their business works, and give some potential customers insight into how they're working on things.
Or... it could be an opportunity for a marketing-speak filled cover-up which would damage their credibility further.
This however has made me pause, we are a small team and I like my sleep. A response would be awesome.
ps. pretty happy with Softlayer over all btw.
Disks seem to be the real weakness of all cloud solutions so far. Local storage is the only cost effective way to have high performance disk, and that makes provisioning cloud instances much harder. There might actually be some stuff to do in this space using dual-ported SAS or SATA with dual port SAS drives, purely for failover.
We're going to try moving to their "Bare Metal" cloud db offering To take advantage of local storage (10x faster writes in my tests)
mgkimsal is spot on with his (sarcastic) comment, you need to think for yourself.
Wouldn't keepalived or heartbeat help with failover? If I see an instance died, I would delete it and start a new instance with a latest backed up image. I assume it would take ~15 minutes compared to relying on the support.
http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/06/disk-io-benchmarking-in...