Fwd: FreeBSD on Rackspace Could

[Aryeh Friedman]

For us it is mostly cost but the other advantage (with RS at least) is
you can size the "hardware" to fit your needs and not get any more
then you need... for example when we first started our consulting firm
back in July we bought 256MB of RAM (RS sizes the Disk, CPU,
Bandwidth, etc. as a multiple of RAM) and then moved to 512MB in Sept.
and except for the 10 mins it took for RS to transfer our server image
from a 1U VM to a 2U VM (1U = 256MB/RAM) the move was completely
painless and no time and effort was needed to update the OS, 3rd party
apps, our custom made code, etc....

Like I said early the only downside of using RS as our primary server
provider (even though we use it for internal development only [but
since each of the 3 partners lives in a different part of the US it is
much cheaper and easier then having it in one of our houses because
none of our ISP's allow static IP's for non-business users which is
twice the cost almost])


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tom Worster <fsb at thefsb.org>
Date: Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 9:34 AM
Subject: Re: FreeBSD on Rackspace Could
To: dalescott at shaw.ca
Cc: FreeBSD <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>


On 11/13/10 6:32 PM, "dalescott at shaw.ca" <dalescott at shaw.ca> wrote:

>> but dedicated/vps does not offer what cloud computing does.
>
>What do feel are the advantages of the cloud?

i haven't used one yet but, as far as i can tell, the interesting
differences derive from how the could platform implements network, storage
and compute elements in a distributed hardware system meshed up with a
mesh interconnect (presumably of the high-performance computing type).

the resulting advantages for me: the storage arrays are raid 10 and all
their responsibility not mine; shared file systems are part of the
platform so i don't need to mess around with nfs; load balancing (which i
currently can't afford) is part of the network platform; so is the address
juggling needed for high availability (failover and restoration); and the
price for each vm seems to allow me maybe 2 or 3x as many hosts as i get
with dedicated servers so i can separate the db servers from the rest of
the app and assign no more memory than i need to each vm.

in summary, it seems i can get the high-availability, load-sharing
architecture i want at a price that's beyond my budget with dedicated
hosts.

and it looks like there's a bunch of other nice aspects that aren't
radical but will be time savers: backups, standby images, simpler sysadmin
(there's a lot less to a cloud server "slice" than a whole computer),
monitoring, persistence.

does this begin to answer your question?


this weekend i tried out gentoo on a wee celeron box i have. (someone here
said gentoo was the linux most like freebsd and rackspace cloud offers
it). it's the first linux experience i've had in which i didn't feel like
a clumsy incompetent. the similarities and differences relative to freebsd
are interesting. maybe i'll write up my initial impressions.


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