We are a very small mobile company (building an application for the iphone) and we are currently considering hosting services. We are currently leaning towards Amazon's hosting/web services. Accordingly, I have some questions:
1) Can I create an admin account on AWS and assign user accounts to developers that should have access to most (but not all) features.
2) Do we need to learn / use AWS APIs in the development of our product? I don't like the
idea of having to create hooks into a hosting service.
3) It looks like the pricing for AWS scales with usage. So, since we are in development and have only developers accessing the server right now, am I right that the cost will be quite low if anything?
4) How does AWS do version management? We have several developers scattered throughout the country. Each will need to checkout the the recent build from the server for development
on his local box. Basically, something like SVN. Is this possible?
5) I am guessing we need something like a dev, svn, and production server? Is this right? If so, how do I set this up and find out the associated costs?
6) We are considering a few database options, among them NoSQL and Neo4j - will we be able to do this using AWS? The server language will be Java.
Thanks for your time.
To answer your questions:
Yes, kind of. There is Identity and Access Management offered by AWS, but it's not the easiest solution to use. Having said that, it can allow you to lock down some of the access activities on an account so that you have some control over your users. I would say that AWS is still very much a single-user environment for server administrators.
You could get away using only the management console. Your use of scripting may only be required if you want to run batch or periodic activities (eg. take a snapshot of all machines at 2am every night).
Costs for EC2 are low, especially for the Micro machine sizes. But keep in mind that the idea of cloud computing is the availability of on-demand resources for short term use. If you run dev machines needlessly over night then you will still be paying! And if someone launches an Extra Large machine (or 30 machine instances) then you will suddenly find yourself with bigger bills than expected.
(5. and 6. as well) Amazon EC2 is really about issuing you the boxes. What you do thereafter is fully up to you. You can create snapshots daily of your machines, you can deploy SVN and noSQL etc. etc.
I've been seriously into EC2 for a while now, and lots of companies are starting to look at the idea you propose. There are benefits to giving staff on-demand compute power, without having to manage any infrastructure in-house. But I will re-iterate my first point that EC2 is very much a single-user, server administration environment, which doesn't lend itself to being used as a dev playground without additional tools. (Or at least it becomes a challenging task if you have several devs spread around in your company).
I own a business that helps companies use EC2 for dev/lab/playground type of environments. I won't directly flog it here, but will show a quick demo we just put on DropBox: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16347737/RequestEC2Machines.html Feel free to request a machine to see how adding process to EC2 can help meet your goals.
I run/develop a website using Amazon EC2 & SimpleDB and I have some comments for you on your questions
Hi.
We are a very small mobile company (building an application for the iphone) and we are currently considering hosting services. We are currently leaning towards Amazon's hosting/web services. Accordingly, I have some questions:
1) Can I create an admin account on
AWS and assign user accounts to
developers that should have access to
most (but not all) features.
In my experience, there doesn't seem to be a direct correspondence between Amazon users and users on a single instance. An instance's root account is connected to the amazon account indirectly through a key pair. Although, I must say that I haven't explored this question in detail.
2) Do we need to learn / use AWS APIs in the development of our product? I don't like the > idea of having to create hooks into a hosting service.
I manage everything through their web console and Eclipse IDE plugins. I've never had to touch the API yet for development and deployment.
3) It looks like the pricing for AWS scales with usage. So, since we are in
development and have only developers accessing the server right now, am
I right that the cost will be quite low if anything?
Micro instances cost the lowest and the cost is pretty good if you're just starting an instance for a couple of hours and then stopping it. I never think twice about starting a micro instance to try out something new
4) How does AWS do version management? We have several developers
scattered throughout the country. Each will need to checkout the the recent
build from the server for development on his local box. Basically, something like SVN.
Is this possible?
I haven't seen this feature being offered directly by Amazon. You can of course keep an instance always on for your repository with backups
5) I am guessing we need something like a dev, svn, and production server?
Is this right? If so, how do I set this up and find out the associated costs?
EC Pricing - http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/
Amazon Simple Monthly Calculator - http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html
6) We are considering a few database options, among them NoSQL and Neo4j -
will we be able to do this using AWS? The server language will be Java.
Amazon instances can be what you want them to be, hence you can either use a pre-configured ami to launch an instance or start off with a bare bones Ubuntu Server or Windows Server e.g. and build a system with what you want. You can then save the snapshot of that system to launch more in the future or to re-launch if your instance crashes
Related
We want to start working with liferay. But the server is too heavy and the developpers computer don't have enought RAM. We want to centralize the server instance.
In other words, we want to build a development server where all developpers can connect and directly develop in their web browser, compile, view the result and push the code to git repository.
I found some good cloud IDE like eclipse CHE and a good maven archetype for liferay projet. So i can build the projet with maven. But now i want to know if it is possible to configure Liferay like every developpers can work without troubling another. And if possible, How ?
The developpers can share the same database and can use different port. Maybe, the server can generate tempory URL like some online cloud editor.
I found this post Liferay With Multiple Server Instances, but i don't think is the best way because he create one server per project. I think is too heavy.
If necessary, We have kubernetes in our IS.
Liferay's tomcat bundle, by default, is configured to take a maximum of 2.5G for the process, but it can run with far less - the default only recently was bumped up, because many people never change the default and then wonder why production systems run out of memory. For 1 concurrent user (the sole developer) on a machine, I guess that the previous default of 1G heap space is enough. Are you saying that that's too much for your developers' machines?
Having many developers on a shared server poses one problem: Yes, you may deploy different code from different machines, but: How about setting a breakpoint? Can you connect with multiple debuggers? If something fails, how do you know whos recent deployment caused the failure?
Sharing a server is an integration technique, not a development technique. If your developers don't have enough memory available for running their own Liferay server next to their IDE, it's a lot cheaper to upgrade their machines than to slow them down when everybody is accessing the same server and they can't properly debug. You pay the memory once, but your waiting developers by the hour.
Is it possible to share one server? Sure it is.
Is it possible to share one server without troubling each other? I doubt.
When you say: You think it's too heavy: What are you basing that assumption on? What does the actual developer machine look like and what keeps you from investing in the extra memory?
It's trivial to share some infrastructure - i.e. have all of them connect to the same database server (and give everyone their own schema). But just the extra effort and setup might require you to pay the developers by the hour as much as you'd otherwise pay for a couple of memory chips.
And yet another option is: Run Liferay on a remote server, but keep 1 instance per developer. This way you don't need the local memory, but can have the memory in the cloud. Calculate if you pay more for remote cloud machines than for local memory - that decision is up to you.
I am building a UWP app that targets both x86, x64 and ARM platforms. I want to replace the current implementation that uses Azure for the backed (an App Service and an SQL Server) because of the high price and because my Pay-As-You-Go subscription does not allow me to set a spending limit.
I thought about using a local database but I don't know if that could be a solution since I want the user to be able to have his data synced on both PC and phone for example. I am also ok with renouncing the idea of a structured database in favor of structured files (like xml) if I can find a way to keep them somewhere in the cloud (and then I can read/write them from the client app - no need for App Service).
Are there any free, non-trial alternatives to Azure? Or should I look more into the file storage implementation? Thanks in advance.
Instead of Azure you could use another web hosting solution to publish you API. Azure also offers small free plans that might be sufficient.
An alternative would be to request access and store/sync data to user's OneDrive. Each logged in user with Microsoft Account should have OneDrive storage available so this is a good middle-ground, which is still free for you. A nice introduction to this can be found in this article.
UWP also offers RoamingFolder where you can store small files that are synced across the devices that you use. Unfortunately this is less reliable because you are not able to control when the sync happens and cannot resolve conflicts.
I have successfully migrated to another cloud platform: Heroku. In my opinion, at least for small apps, Heroku offers the best solution both technology-wise and price-wise.
I am now able to have a webservice hosted for free in the cloud, without worring about traffic and number of requests. Of course you can scale up if you want better performance, but you can start with a free plan. Also, I have a postgressql db hosted also in the cloud, also for free (up until 10 000 records, and it will be just 9$/month if I want to upgrade to 10 milion). One can never found an offer like this free on Azure.
I had to learn a bit of Node.js (there are a lot of languages Heroku supports for backend services, but .Net is not one of them) but it was totally worth it!
Another option that is now starting to gain more and more popularity is FireBase. I will certantly also check that out for my future apps.
I'd like to deploy kubernetes on a large physical server (24 cores) and I'm uncertain as to a number of things.
What are the pros and cons of creating virtual machines for the k8s cluster other than running on bare-metal.
I have the following considerations:
Creating vms will allow for work load isolation. New vms for experiments can be created and assigned to devs.
On the other hand, with k8s running on bare metal a new NAMESPACE can be created for each developer for experimentation and they can run their code in it. After all their code should be running in docker containers.
Security:
Having vms would limit the amount of access given to future maintainers, limiting the amount of damage that could be done. While on the other hand the primary task for any future maintainers would be adding/deleting nodes and they would require bare metal access to do that.
Authentication:
At the moment devs would only touch the server when their code runs through the CI pipeline and their running deployments are deployed. But what about viewing logs? Could we setup tiered kubectl authentication to allow devs to only access whatever namespaces have been assigned to them (I believe this should be possible with the k8s namespace authorization plugin).
A number of vms already exist on the server. Would this be an issue?
128 cores and doubts.... That is a lot of cores for a single server.
For kubernetes however this is not relevant:
Kubernetes can use different sized servers and utilize them to the maximum. However if you combine the master server processes and the node/worker processes on a single server, you might create unwanted resource issues. You can manage those with namespaces, as you already mention.
What we do is use continuous integration with namespaces in a single dev/qa kubernetes environment in which changes have their own namespace (So we run many many namespaces) and run full environment deployments in those namespaces. A bunch of shell scripts are used to manage this. This works both with a large server as what you have, as well as it does with smaller (or virtual) boxes. The benefit of virtualization for you could mainly be in splitting the large box in smaller ones so that you can also use it for other purposes then just kubernetes (yes, kubernetes runs except MS Windows, no desktops, no kernel modules for VPN purposes, etc).
I would separate dev and prod in the form of different vms. I once had a webapp inside docker which used too many threads so the docker daemon on the host crashed. It was limited to one host luckily. You can protect this by setting limits, but it's a risk: one mistake in dev could bring down prod as well.
I think the answer is "it depends!" which is not really an answer. Personally, I would split up the machine using VM's and deploy that way. You've got better flexibility as to how much of the server's resources you carve out and you can easily create new environments, then destroy easily.
Even if these vms are really big, I think it's still easier to manage also given that you have existing vm's on the machine.
That said, there's not a technical reason that you can't run a single node server, but you may run into problems with downtime with upgrades (if that's an issue), as well as if that server needs patched or rebooted, then your entire cluster is down.
I would look at your environment needs for HA and uptime, as well as how you are going to deploy VM's (if you go that route), and decide what works the best for you.
I am looking for a "free" IaaS service as an alternative to EC2 which will let me SSH into a system with full user permissions (create/delete files, install services, libraries and applications from the repository).
Tried OpenShift but ended up leaving due to strict permission policy on the SSH. Heroku, dotCloud, CloudFoundry.com, Stackato are PaaS providers. Rackspace and Linode might have what I need but are not free.
Is my own home server or EC2 are the only two options that I have? For the curious, I want to deploy my entire .vim folder and .vimc file for development on the cloud from a computer when I am not at home.
It seems like you want something for free that is not provided anywhere for free. I know its a shame, but it is reasonable that companies would charge for such a thing. Given that you want it for free I am guessing that you don't need much power or anything large scale. In that case I would look into the cheaper end of Virtual Private servers or a micro instance on EC2. VPS servers start at around $20 a month and a micro server starts at $14. Of course for the microserver you will have to pay a little extra for bandwidth and probably and EBS volume. Additionally AWS offers a free tier which pretty much allows you to run a micro instance with EBS for the first year.
What tools or strategies are you using for automation of EC2 activities?
I need to be able to bring up a number of EC2 instances, provision various software to it (primarily Python packages), interact with S3 (primarily download data), and run various jobs. I'll be doing this both on-demand and on a scheduled basis.
I'm trying to decide if I should:
Create an AMI with all my software loaded on it
or
Launch a plain vanilla linux AMI instance and scp my software to it
For the provisioning and automation Boto looks pretty good. Or I could write something with Paramiko. Recommend either or anything else I should be looking it?
Basically I'm looking for advice / success stories, let me know what's working for you.
To answer your bullets about selecting AMIs, I would say that it depends on how much software you're installing.
I have been successful with a hybrid approach, where I build an AMI and load my heavyweight and more stable software. This is the stuff that needs to run an installer, or takes considerable time to install (remember that if you re-install a package every time as part of your startup process, you're paying for the install every time). Then, I upload the small and volatile software at provisioning/startup time. In this bucket goes most of the application code, data, etc. That way, I can change my app and not have to touch the AMI.
The benefits of this approach:
Don't have to pay for running the same software install thousands of times.
AMI can stay fairly stable over time.
Can use software that requires intervention or GUI interaction to install.
Major drawbacks:
Your AMI's OS version will become stale over time.
Your AMI may not be flexible as to the instance type/architecture it will run on. For instance, you may create it on a 32-bit OS and thereby prevent it from running on the High CPU instance types, or vice versa. So you may lock yourself into a pricing scheme.
I don't use Python, so I can't comment on either of the APIs you referenced.
AWS just released the Systems Manager suite, which includes an Automation service that will (among other things) handle your use cases around AMIs.
This question was asked some time ago now but I believe my answer could be useful to other users. I believe the best automations tools available on the market are provided by Cloud Management platforms. For example they offer auto-scaling, configuration software integration (Chef/Puppet), databases replications, dns management...
The most popular cloud management softwares are Scalr (disclaimer: I work there), RightScale and enStratus. Scalr is open-source and released under the Apache 2 license.
Regarding your specific question on AMIs, cloud Management platforms usually provide pre-configured AMIs (at Scalr, we call them roles). If you want to create your own AMI built on an existing instance, you'll be able to create snpashots and use them as a template for future instances.