I'd like to start a free budget/personal finance site and will need plenty of horsepower and storage. I'm definitely a nubee, so how does one get started in terms of hardware infrastructure? Do I need to get a dedicated IP from my ISP and obtain my own servers? Do I go with amazon or Sql Server Data Services/Azure or something like that? Is the latter services free or a discount offering available to non-profit/free services such as the budget/personal finance site I'm looking to start?
If you don't mind writing your web application in python, then I's suggest using Google App Engine. See: What Is Google App Engine?
What I like to do when I have new ideas for a site is to find an inexpensive hosting solution ($10 per month). This allows me to test the idea and see if the site is going to be successful. If it is a flop, I haven't wasted much money and if it is successful I can upgrade to better hosting (dedicated server).
There are many hosting options available and several of them have great tools such as an online SQL Server management studio. Your other option would be to host it yourself if you are prepared to deal with firewall issues, backups, storage, etc.
Whether it is feasible to DIY varies a lot by country...if you have a decent broadband connection with a fixed IP this can be the cheapest route to play around with first, especially if you need an awful lot of storage.
Note however that many fast broadband connections are only fast for downloads - when you're running a server, the speed your users will see is the upload speed, which is usually a lot less. Also, you'll need to do your own admin and backup etc.
Apart from this most hosting options have a price tag on top, varying from virtual hosts (sharing a real machine), to colocation (your machine in somebody's data center), to cloud services like amazon et al (which have a good scaling ability)- and you will need to shop around for the software stack and hardware features you really need.
There's really two ways to answer this question, what differentiates them is budget.
One is to properly design this solution, prototype it, benchmark the prototype, extrapolate anticipated user load, add overhead and scale accordingly. This takes time, costs but gives you a supportable solution that serves your customers well.
The other is to just give something, anything a go and fix the problems as they come along. This is quicker and cheaper but might be a headache for a while and might p*** off your customers.
Basically it comes down to budget.
Best of luck.
Related
first of all would like to say a big thank you to all who is reading my questions, I really appreciate your time and hope to be able contribute back, second, I did see part of my question already asked in another thread but it does not answer it plus my questions have a bit different angle, so here it goes:
Does not elasticity already include scalability? I see scalability and elasticity go as two separate features of the cloud in service promotions, is there a technical difference or is it just marketing play of terminology?
I have similar confusion about compute and networking, does not compute power already include networking, I saw it being briefly displayed as two separate advantages of cloud service
I will give it a try :) But it will largely be my understanding and less citing of provider documentation.
Elasticity vs. Scalability
I interprete elasticity as the capability to react to more or less daily variation in resource needs. Unlike reserved instances or your own server hardware "in the basement" the cloud provider offer both the resources and the managment tools to let you use varying amounts of compute, network , ... resources from hour to hour or day to day.
So elasticity (in my mind) solves the business need to react / adapt to changing demand that might follow a pattern like day / night or season / off-season but might be relatively stable from year to year or even week to week.
Scalability in my mind is more than everything the ability of these "hyper-scalers" to allow customers / you to grow your system continously and almost with no upper limit. So I would say the average (i.e.) weekly usage can go up every week for months after months and you wouldn't run out of upgrade options with the cloud providers to help you serve more and more requests.
Compute and Networking
The cloud uses "software defined networking" which abstracts all that hardware stuff like switches and routers from you as a user and offers connectivity options that would be hard to realize on your own / with traditional networking. So the networking capabilities of a major cloud provider are a feature set of their own, with lots of room for system improvements and capabilities. Therefor it is designed, serviced, billed... separately from other service classes like compute or storage.
A simple example or illustration of that might be a virtual machine (or multiple) that on their own as stand alone compute resources might have a network interface and a public ip attached to them. You can reach that machine, the machine can reach to internet (if you configure it that way) and you can install stuff on it. That's it - you have compute power.
But when you group virtual machines in i.e. application security groups and use these groups as objects in resources that allow, deny, redirect traffic internally or externally and maybe tunnel traffic to these compute resources to your on-premise resources (like in many cases Active Directory Domain Services) you start to use advanced networking capabilites. But obviously there's much more and networking can be one of the hardest parts of certification exams on cloud topics.
I've been looking around for a Node.js hosting service that suits my (probably rather exceptional) needs. It's basically a web app for CMS editors to preview CMS pages. (The actual website is statically hosted.)
So it handles only few requests, but all page requests (*.html) trigger quite a series of actions, to simplify let's say it rebuilds a good part of the website.
What I need is a service that delivers high performance on few occasions. Also it should support continuous deployment, so that when we update something, the app stays always on. (also the simpler the better: I'm a frontend developer, not a dev ops).
I've tried Google Cloud: painfully slow update mechanism, rather complex, but stable and fast, but only if you pay a lot.
Heroku is very simple, but their plans are for standard web apps, focusing on many requests, high bandwidth etc. Still, the $250 plan is rather ok in terms of performance. But again: pricey.
Jelastic would offer this flexible vertical scaling. But it's hard to do Continuous deployment and I have not yet figured out how to update an app without interruption of service.
I also though about renting a virtual private server, but again I would not know how to provide continuous delivery. Also, I'd rather have a dedicated service.
It feels like there must be a simple service that I've just missed. I'm grateful for any help or hints!
I have finally found an answer to my search: Google Cloud Run
You'll only pay by usage, and it still offers very good performance. For my scenario it decreases cost by a crazy factor: we'll pay less than 1% of the previous solution (driven by Google App Engine).
I've also tried AWS Lambda, but I had many issues with the rather extensive node app (like dynamic requires).
Hopefully my question is in the right forum here. I've just checked out the pricing model of windows azure and checked out the different configuration options:
http://www.windowsazure.com/de-de/pricing/calculator/
I have been working as a developer for almost two years now and worked a lot with IIS and the WPF technology. As a little private project I checked out HTML 5 and JS with MVC4 Web API and wondered what azure configuration I'd need to host a MVC 4 Web API project. Would it be rather a virtual machine or a full calculator? What benefits grants one over another?
I am going to start my studies soon, so I'd like the cheapest I can possibly get. I won't use it a lot (mainly for testing reasons), as well I think there won't be too much traffic either. Would a virtual machine also include the possibility of using IIS?
Could I also run a MVC project with something else than VM/full calculator?
And what would happen if for some reason my traffic just explodes? Would my services just be shut down until I increase the power of my machine? Or would I just get a huge bill and be surprised quite a lot?
Use websites.
You can start with 10 Web Sites absolutely free! So this is the cheapest. And it certainly supports MVC4 Web API.
For starter you can get a 3 month trial with enough credits to start. By default you'll have a spending limit on your account. This mean if you start to get too much traffic your services will shut down and you won't have to pay any extra. I think you can configure how much you are willing to pay but I never tried, it is still the default which is 0$.
You should start with Shared Web Sites and move to reserved instance, VM or web role later if you ever need to scale up or out.
I have started work on a game project which is expected to have a very high load on the servers.
My original plan was going with a general main server which hosts general game data and using a collection of servers hosting a node (or game world) server, being balanced with more CPU/network intensive worlds being hosted in less numbers on the machine.
Now I was wondering how it's best for me to set up the actual servers. Should I go with a cloud like Microsoft Azure, should I host it all myself on own bought hardware or should I use dedicated hosting from some hosting company?
Windows Azure actually has a Toolkit for Social Games which might provide some good guidance.
https://github.com/WindowsAzure-Toolkits/wa-toolkit-games
On Github the architecture section might also help you think about an Azure Solution
https://github.com/WindowsAzure-Toolkits/wa-toolkit-games/wiki/architecture
Re: Servers, the cloud is a perfect match for this workload/use case, you can grow quickly or fail fast depending on how successful you are and only ever pay for what you use. Azure has a IaaS and PasS offering which should meet all your needs (inc Windows and Linux on IaaS)
Well I believe now days people are engaged in social games; I believe you would be doing the same.
unsure about the development environment I suggest you to look at the Game Hosting by amazon.. It could be somewhat costlier but better then to have your own provided it meet all your needs.
You can also check gamersisle who allows you to rent game server based on your wish so you can rent more when you feel you are hitting client counts.
Happy game development.
P.S :- I always wonder how people build game.. just learning how? ;)
I am looking for simple analogies to explain windows azure, app fabric, etc to students or layman person. Please let me know if you have any suggestions.
Thanks
N
Well, first I would try and talk about how we used to build and maintain things. Buying our own hardware, building it, programming it, and connecting it to the internet. That's the old way. Then, I would pivot into what cloud service providers are. In a nutshell, they are just somebody else's servers. Usually Amazons, Microsoft's or Googles servers. AWS/Azure/GCP.
Here is a quick youtube video explaining it in layman's terms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ERdeg8Sfv4
Cloud service providers offer web portal, a website, where folks can click and build services like storage, backup, DNS, database, more websites, load balancing, and - maybe the most popular - virtual machine hosting.
What makes CSPs so successful is economies of scale. CSPs will build huge data centers and engineer them to provide the kind of services that most businesses need. COntrast that to if every business were to build their own from scratch. There are however lots of challenges to these CSPs, like needing a lot more spare capacity and having to build something that fits everyone as opposed to something that fits a particular user. So, for a small business, whether they save money depends on their use case. You might save more building from scratch, but then you'd have to train and pay folks to maintain your own servers.
One of the most revolutionary benefits that cloud service providers brought into the market is that purchasing additional capacity is much easier and faster. You might have taken weeks to buy hardware and install it at your location. Or if you are renting though traditional suppliers you might take a few hours to let them manually reconfigure things. However they now make everything automatic so you can get a new server within seconds. This have allowed businesses to build their applications to allow them to scale on demand. This means that they pay different amount of money for the services depending on how much they use. This have the ability to reduce costs but it again require more time to develop and maintain the more complex applications.