I am talking about big companies, like ebay, Amazon. Do they host their application servers on Virtual Machine instances like EC2? Or they are still using physical servers? Is there a trend to move from physical servers to VMs because VMs are cost-effective and scalable?
Thanks!
Update: I found an article here: http://gigaom.com/2012/04/09/why-instagram-is-likely-moving-on-from-amazons-cloud/
Instagram was building on virtual infrastruture before, but its owner FB might be considering to move away from AWS.
But the question still remains: Are the applicaiton still running on virtualized OSes or on native OSes?
HostCabi.net surveys the top 500 hosting providers which accounts for the top 100,000 websites excluding the actual top 500 which are surveyed in the top 500 websites including who hosts them.
I'm not aware of a specific table that is going to show you what technology each hosting company provides, for that you would have to check on the website of the hosting company to see what service they offer.
Related
We have a client that we have setup two webservers running about a dozen different websites spread over each webserver for each site (so site 1 is running on both webservers, site 2 is running on both ect).
We want to setup load balancing (presumably with Traffic Manager) so that it will spread the load and monitor the sites availability across both the web servers per site and not per virtual machine like the regular Azure load balanced sets do.
It seems that traffic manager might be able to do this but we don't know how it works and the documentation is not clear to us about if we can setup the TM per website and not per web server (as we understand it).
Can we setup any load balancing in Azure that will monitor the website itself and not the virtual machine? Because we want to run multiple sites on these two web servers, how do we setup TM do allow this to happen? Do we make a new TM service for each website?
thanks in advance.
UPDATE: do we even need to setup the regular load balancing set at all? Can I not just create a TM and click on the cloud services of each of the web servers and then add the port and relative path to one of the websites? and just repeat this for each website on the two servers? would that be how it should be setup?
Thanks again.
The available endpoints you can define in your Traffic Manager definition is only as granular as your cloud service URLs. So, the quick answer to your question is no.
You may want to look into using Application Request Routing in front of your two servers instead. It does introduce additional server(s) in your configuration but will give you a way to load balance across the sites.
http://www.iis.net/downloads/microsoft/application-request-routing
The answer to this question was custom end points from traffic manager. This will allow Azure to be able to monitor the service for each service or website on a web server within Azure.
I am new to Azure and website deployment, and I am trying to make sure I understand how things work. As far as I understand, once I create a website, a web application is created and begins to run in the cloud before publishing my own site even.
I know that the cloud provides scalability, load-balancing (among multiple datacenters), ease of publishing/testing, etc...things that don't exist in traditional web hosting.
So my question is since my website is in the cloud/Azure now, would my website be replicated globally in MS datacenters? If yes, is it something different from load-balancing? in other words, is the idea behind it is to get my site replicated to provide faster access from all over the world. And if all these are correct, I suppose traditional web hosting doesn't support replication.
Sorry for the simple questions, but I really need to understand, and I would appreciate any details you could provide.
Q: So my question is since my website is in the cloud/Azure now, would my website be replicated globally in MS datacenters?
A: Your website won't be automatically replicated globally to all MS datacenters. Each azure service, whether it is an cloud-service, sql-azure, storage, website or VM is located at a location of your choice. Within a location you can scale some of the services to run in multiple instances. If you spawn a new instance your website gets replicated. But it still runs at the same geo-location.
Q: If yes, is it something different from load-balancing?
A: In Azure you need to distinguish between load-balancing and traffic-management. If you run multiple instances within one location, there is only one external URL to reach it. The load-balancer distributes traffic equally to every running service instance.
The Traffic Manager allows you to control the distribution of user traffic to Windows Azure hosted services. The hosted services can be running in the same data center or in different centers across the world. Traffic Manager works by applying an policy engine to the Domain Name Service (DNS) queries on your domain name(s).
So in general, if you want to spread your application all over the world, you have to do it by yourself.
Create your service on all the location of your choice and use Traffic Manager to connect them.
I'm looking at Azure Reserved Web Sites as an option for ASP.NET application hosting. But I couldn't find information about the following two aspects:
Is the Reserved instance size/resources (e.g. Medium VM, 2 x 1.6GHz CPU, 3.5GB RAM) shared with the instance OS and OS services, just like a VM? Or is this a dedicated computing capacity excluding the OS?
In a blog post (http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2012/09/17/announcing-great-improvements-to-windows-azure-web-sites.aspx) Scott Guthrie mentioned about running multiple sites in a single Reserved instance (much like a VM but without fully-managed), but it's not clear to me as to how multiple sites (with different domains names) are setup/configured in Reserved instances from the Management Tool:
you could run a single site within a reserved instance VM or 100 web-sites within it for the same cost
Any clarification is appreciated.
Just like a VM, it will be shared with instance OS and OS services.
For hosting multiple web sites in reserved instance...read here...Is it possible to have multiple azure web sites running off a single reserved instance
also.
and How to configure multiple host headers for one Azure WebSite reserved instance
You can also read more about host headers in Microsoft documentation.
In order to run multiple web sites on a single server go to your azure management portal. Pick a web site you would like to scale to a standard server. You will see the list of all your web sites deployed to azure. You can pick the ones you want to be deployed to your standard server instance together.
See screenshot below from the management portal.
I know next to nothing about server management and just got started with Amazon Web Services.
I want to deploy a Linux server which runs Apache, MySQL, phpMyAdmin as well as email capabilities (account mgmt and webmail interface) and backup capabilities. I want to administer the server with a nice web user interface like cPanel, doing things like file management, email account management, access to phpMyAdmin.
Therefore I thought about deploying a shared Linux AMI, instead of building and configuring the server myself. I want to make my life easy, that is, deploying something pre-existing which is easy to manage (web user interface) since I haven't got time to learn all about server management right now.
I found this list of images. Which one of these would fit my requirements?
This is an inappropriate use case for EC2. As Amazons CTO Werner Vogels said a few months ago "an EC2 instance is not a server, it's a building block." EC2 is used to provide computing resources to an application that spans multiple, loosely-coupled services. It's not a drop in replacement for a standard VPS.
That's not to say that a lot of people aren't using EC2 instances as servers. However, these are often the same people who bitterly complain about excessive downtime on AWS without realizing that it's mostly their own fault. An application must be designed to be deployed in a cloud-based environment when it's built on an IaaS platform like AWS. If your application is not aware of autoscaling groups and other high-availability features then traditional dedicated hosting will be cheaper, less complex, and more durable than AWS.
I am aware of AMI's for webmin, but not for cPanel. Here is the link:
https://www.virtualmin.com/documentation/aws/virtualmin_gpl_ami
I would echo the comments made by #jamieb however in that this is really not a good use case for EC2. You are limited to a single elastic IP per instance, so you have no ability to do IP-based virtual hosts as you would with a typical VPS.
We are on the process of choosing a Cloud provider to run our VMs, and we would like to better understand the differences between AWS and the new Azure.
Does anyone know if Azure Cloud (IaaS) have an equivalent for the AWS Route53 and Elastic Load Balancer?
If it has, how does it work? Do they also have several different zones across the globe capable of providing High-Availability with minimum impact on the latency?
Thank you
Microsoft doesn't have a DNS service like Route53. But does support common DNS operations such as c-name routing/forwarding to various Windows Azure services. As for zones, there are currently 8 locations that MSFT offers for hosting of Windows Azure, 2 in Europe, 2 in Asia, 4 in the US, and Fujistsu offers hosting of some Windows Azure services in Japan. With the possible exception of Fujitsu (I don't know the details of their SLA), all Windows Azure Services are at least 99.9% (the definition of "highly available" is subjective). Additionally, Microsoft has the Content Delivery Network with more than 24 nodes spread across the globe to help speed delivery and reduce the latency of content being delivered to almost any geography.
For the most part yes, there is equivalence. Windows Azure has always had a load balancer on any external endpoint (exposed over the VIP). It is not a super programmable firewall at this point (you cannot do more than simply remove yourself from rotation), but it works very well for web farm scenarios.
Cloud Traffic Manager works very well for geo-locating your services in Windows Azure. Just deploy your service in multiple datacenters, configure a few settings in traffic manager, and you are done. Most folks use it for 'best performance' (i.e. closest DC to customer), but also you can use it for 'failover'.
In terms of DNS, there is no equivalent service today for handling external DNS names. You handle DNS today with your own servers. That is one point where AWS is ahead.