Introducing Linodes in Frankfurt | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Linodes in Frankfurt

blog.linode.com

62 pointsakerl_14 comments

Related question -- does anyone run a site which is hosted in multiple locations?

Say you have a read-only site, and you have one copy in the Fremont CA data center, one in Frankfurt, and one in Asia. How do you direct users to the closest one network-wise?

(For static content, you can offload this problem to a CDN, but I'm wondering if you can do it just on Linode)

An old way to do it would be to have the users choose and set a cookie that redirects. But I wonder if you can do it transparently, like Google or Yahoo. Is there a DNS trick which implements this, or something else?

Round Robbin DNS[0] is a simple method for balancing HTTP requests, done entirely at the nameserver. Let's say you have 3 servers, located at 3 separate IP addresses. You create multiple A-Records, each pointing to a different IP address, and (in theory) the client will choose the fastest connection.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-robin_DNS

Would clients actually choose the fastest connection? That page says that the client will typically choose the first address, so you can use this for load distribution among servers, but it doesn't say anything about client latency.

If I have 5K users in US, 2K in Europe, and 1K in Asia, I wouldn't want the traffic to evenly distributed. I would want users to go to the closest/fastest server.

The StackOverflow post above looks like a good start.

The easiest way would be to use GeoDNS. You just have your DNS server send out a different IP according to the IP of the request.

See http://www.caraytech.com/geodns/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodns

I've found this nice answer on StackOverlow that show the differences between Anycast, GeoDNS and using an http redirect: http://stackoverflow.com/a/25678199

Great thanks! It looks like the questioner ended up using AWS Route 53, which supports this kind of thing. I'm not using AWS, and there are other options, but that is the kind of thing I am happy to offload to AWS.

Amazing effort by Linode that they keep striving to improve and have pushed up a gear to new features unlike years ago but Linode has the storage problem where they only offer SSD disk storage and there is nothing comparable to AWS S3 or even their SSD disk rates are not comparable to EBS - I do understand that Linode's SSD are better performance wise but when I do not need the performance I have no other options.. There is a bigger problem with Linodes is the Linode Images[1], how do they expect the disk images to be less than 2GB and here goes there policy on images- "There is no additional charge to store images for Linode users, with a limit of 2GB per Image, with a total of 10GB total Image storage and 100 Images per account."

[1]https://www.linode.com/docs/platform/linode-images

I've had no problems using Linode Images with that as the limit. I use it to pre-bake some package updates that take a while so that I can use the image to provision new systems:

https://github.com/dock0/vm_config/blob/master/meta/image-bu...

https://github.com/dock0/vm_config/blob/master/meta/deploy.r...

>nlike years ago but Linode has the storage problem where they only offer SSD disk storage

Are you confusing them with Digital Ocean? Their SSD option is fairly new, and much, much later than DO's offerings. Linode announced offering SSDs in April of 2014.

https://blog.linode.com/2014/04/17/linode-cloud-ssds-double-...

AFAIK, linode currently only offers SSD storage. I agree that this can be a problem for some use-cases. Vultr is often a better alternative for people who require large storage with lighter performance requirements.

Linode Images aren't intended to store data or function as a backup. (They have a separate paid feature for that). It's to help you provision new linodes.

I do echo your thoughts on that they should offer a HDD-backed storage instance plan, however.

Nice to see Linode adding another data center!

Off-top, but (hopefully) interesting: We've been using Linode to host an Aerospike [1] cluster. They're one of the few cloud providers that give you direct raw access to the SSD drives. (Raw being you can mount an unformatted SSD partition). Performance has been stellar.

[1] http://www.aerospike.com/

How do you get a custom 32 Bit image running on Linode, on both Xen and KVM? I tried to get a KVM system running and I failed after going through a hard time. Why don't they simply make it OpenStack compatible so you can run a KVM system like it should?

My free credit is going to waste!!

Do anyone know if you can easily move servers to a new linode datacentre?

Yes, just open a support ticket. It's tricky if you want to do it without any downtime though.

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