Recomendations on provider with the following requirements?

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Posted by DFBart, 02-13-2011, 04:14 PM
I've been looking for a reliable cloud provider for the past few weeks, and I can't seem to find one that fits my needs. What I need: - Ability to share IPs between VMs for HA - Ability to assign extra IPs to VMs on the fly through an API - Ability to scale a VM up or down, preferably have cpu/ram/disk scalable separately - Close to if not 100% proven uptime - Decent prices, I don't mind paying but I don't need server admin support, so costs shouldn't be insane - Ability to provision VMs through an API Does anyone have recommendations on any providers that will meet all of the above criteria?
Posted by garmanonline, 02-13-2011, 05:53 PM
VPS.net? Cost is a bit high but for the features you are requesting your field is really cut down. Main concern is probably the sharing IP's between VM's... I don't know if you will find a provider that will set that up or not. However VPS.net DOES offer instant provisioning IP's, API to setup VM's on the fly (great for reseller). Great scalability. That's my suggestion.
Posted by DFBart, 02-13-2011, 05:57 PM
VPS.net has been one of the ones I was looking at. They don't offer IP sharing, but apparently this is in the works. Not sure about the time frame yet, but if they were to implement this, I would probably end up going with them. Only feature they lack apart from that is separately scalable resources.
Posted by JasonD10, 02-13-2011, 10:35 PM
Are you looking for a Clustered Cloud environment?
Posted by DFBart, 02-13-2011, 10:47 PM
Whats the difference between clustered cloud vs regular cloud?
Posted by JasonD10, 02-13-2011, 10:51 PM
Apologies if I caused any confusion. When you mentioned sharing IPs between VM's for HA I thought you may be building a Cluster on the Cloud. So what I meant was basically that, Clustering in itself is not related to Cloud (as IaaS is) but if you are in fact Clustering, there are definitely going to be better providers than others as this is a high level service that would much more benefit from an integrated platform that is built with this in mind.
Posted by DFBart, 02-13-2011, 11:03 PM
Essentially what I need is to be able to load balance across several servers (mostly web/db servers) while retaining the ability to take a portion of them down at any given time for maintenance and have the rest of them pick up the load. This can be done at the load balancer, but I don't want a single point of failure at the load balancer.
Posted by JasonD10, 02-13-2011, 11:11 PM
Ok gotcha, that's what I figured but just wanted to make sure. How big of an environment is this for? Do you have a budget set yet? Is this LAMP or WISA? It does sound like you need a fully clustered environment. Reach out to some providers that use AppLogic and see what they can do for you.
Posted by DFBart, 02-14-2011, 12:49 AM
LAMP. Size shouldn't matter much as the idea is that it should scale as demand grows. As for the budget, probably around the few hundred per month mark. I'm not too picky when it comes to costs.
Posted by garmanonline, 02-14-2011, 08:08 AM
Have you considered just having a Round Robin DNS setup instead of shared IP's... might make things easier for you that way. Just need to ensure data replication which would already be something you are looking at having to handle. Just get a DNS provider that allows for round robin DNS and maybe something with failover to remove IP's that fail to resolve.
Posted by JasonD10, 02-14-2011, 10:47 AM
Well, to build a true cluster with redundant and high available Cloud Servers with floating IPs and full integration, ease of management with shared NAS storage for your web servers, redundant and HA MySQL servers, redundant and HA load balancers, redundant and HA firewalls, private LAN for the Cluster, and ease of management with self-managed Cloud Servers and various other things.. that does cost some money so $50/mo that won't happen with as there's enough overhead on resources just on the HA instances but a few hundred should get you in the door. It is still far cheaper than a traditional server cluster Providers aren't allowed to solicit your business directly so reach out to those using AppLogic as that is the only Cloud technology able to properly build out Clusters.
Posted by boskone, 02-14-2011, 11:21 AM
Sharing a single IP across multiple machines will not be an easy one to fulfill, but the other requirements seem quite reasonable.
Posted by Mr Terrence, 02-14-2011, 11:26 AM
Is this a joke? the links you posted has nothing to do with the OPs request.
Posted by Mr Terrence, 02-14-2011, 11:33 AM
Were you looking to resell these VMs?
Posted by DFBart, 02-14-2011, 02:00 PM
No, they're for my own uses. AppLogic looks very interesting. I'll be checking this out for sure.
Posted by BitRefinery, 02-21-2011, 07:09 PM
With vCloud Director from VMware, they have released a bunch of APIs that you could use. Google: vCloud Director Documentation for the APIs docs. You just need to find a provider that offers vCD. -Tom
Posted by tommo163, 03-01-2011, 06:10 AM
Geographically where are you looking for a provider, in the UK or the US?
Posted by DFBart, 03-02-2011, 11:13 AM
Looking in US only for the time being.
Posted by brentpresley, 03-04-2011, 09:11 AM
There is no such thing as 100% uptime. Any truly excellent provider lists "5 9s" for uptime, i.e. 99.999%, which is approximately no more than 8.6s of down time a month. They "guarantee" 100% uptime by giving you credits back for down time, which any good provider is going to do. Here is a discussion about their last cloud outage: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1008324 I'm not knocking their service, they do great in that regards, just point out there is no such thing as true 100% uptime, even with cloud.
Posted by erickmiller, 03-08-2011, 02:29 AM
The requirement doesn't sound like anything beyond clustered load balancers with a farm of web servers. Am I wrong? Eric
Posted by DFBart, 03-08-2011, 03:18 AM
I've tried Rackspace, and it's not what I'm looking for. I've tried VPS.net as well, but they don't support IP sharing. To be honest, while Amazon's EC2 doesn't directly support the features I am looking for, they do do what I need to have done (with the exception of the multiple IP thing, but I can get around that by running an SSL termination server in another datacenter close by). ELBs are supposedly built to be fault tolerant and self healing, but even if one goes down, a new one can be provisioned almost instantly. This, coupled with multiple availability zones per region is rather attractive. The only issue I have with going the amazon EC2 route is that I'll have to modify my app a bit to make it self healing, but using amazon's api makes this a breeze. Auto scaling based on demand is also very attractive. It's probably a good idea anyways to add logic so that it can add/remove servers on the fly and not lose any data should one crash. Pretty sure I'm going to stick with Amazon in the end unless something exceptional comes along. Last edited by DFBart; 03-08-2011 at 03:23 AM. Reason: grammar

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