applogic, media temple, ec2 or just a cluster?

[Murat Aktihanoglu]

Hi,

Traffic is doubling at unype.com every 5-6 days (currently around 10K
visits/day), so we are working on scaling, as we are also working on
funding.

Anyone is interested or knows a consultant to help with this?

A typical cluster of memcached-enabled php app servers with mysql
servers should be ok.

EC2 might not be ok because of the lack of immutable storage. Unype is
a virtual-world of social networks, so some tables are write-intensive
and data has to persist.

Any ideas/suggestions would be greatly appreciated,
best,
Murat
http://unype.com

[hank williams]

EC2 might not be ok because of the lack of immutable storage.

FYI, Amazon just announced persistent storage for EC2. It is not yet available, but it is obviously coming soon. Usually they roll this stuff out in little bits at a time.

Hank
 

--
blog: whydoeseverythingsuck.com

[enkiguy]

My company, ENKI, is very convinced that AppLogic is the way to go for
most Web 2.0 / Media sharing / SaaS websites. We started out as a
virtualization consultancy and small hosting company, but found that
90% of our customers' needs were met or exceeded by AppLogic, which we
could deliver at a great price point. Today, we have our own
AppLogic data center as well as reselling AppLogic hosting from other
data centers. We do this on a pay-as-you-go or "utility computing"
model, together with consulting and services so that our customers can
become productive immediately.

Ultimately, we were able to build our business because of AppLogic's
features...
- Easy scalability - simply add more virtual instances or give
existing ones more CPU
- 3-nines reliability out of the box without having to double up on
hardware, such as if you were to cluster your application. AppLogic
restarts instances that fail due to hardware problems on another
server within minutes.
- Very flexible deployment: most of our startup customers keep
changing their data center architecture and AppLogic's draw-it-and-
deploy-it architecture means we can accommodate our customers'
changing architectures within a few minutes to hours, depending on how
much database migration is necessary.
- Security: Applications or customers sharing a single AppLogic grid
can't "see" each other because they occupy private address spaces,
just like in a private data center. Similarly, hackers can't "see"
into the AppLogic virtual private data centers since all but the
gateways are on a private address space.
- Low cost: AppLogic's reliability is created by having a few standby
servers rather than doubled hardware. Combined with the fact that we
can host multiple customers in a single stack of servers securely, we
can spread the cost of the reliability across the customers, saving
them and us money.
- Rapid deployment: a library of pre-built "appliances" and virtual
private data centers, such as the one you need for LAMP, means we can
provision a new application in less than a day, often in minutes.

We have looked at supporting our customers on EC2, but realized that
the restrictions that EC2 requires meant that we could lose business
if one of our startup customers suddenly started to grow and needed
specialized requirements that EC2 couldn't fulfill. The lack of
immutable instances was one drawback, but also the fact that storage
and compute were not guaranteed to be provisioned in the same place or
with repeatable resources meant that we would be stuck trying to help
our customers fix performance problems without the tools necessary to
do it - which was scary! I have a blog article on our site about EC2
versus AppLogic at http://www.enkiconsulting.net/blog/applogic-vs.-ec2-a-more-reliable-platform.html

I get quite a few customers who aren't satisfied with Media Temple.
The issue there seems mostly to be scalability. If your site can grow
by 20% a day, like a few of our customers, you can hit the wall with
resources quickly. This is one reason we built our own data center,
since it allowed us to add specialized SAN hardware or servers that
better met our customers' needs.

I don't rule out that fully clustered, non-virtualized hardware,
traditionally deployed in a colocation center might be right for you.
The problem with that is that it requires hiring your own IT staff,
even if the colo provider will fix hardware or wire it up for you.
The co-founder and CEO of ENKI and I decided we wanted to let our
customers leverage our experience at NetSuite (a recently-public ERP
startup) to help other startups grow without the cost and hassle of
developing their own IT staff. Again, AppLogic seems to be the best
solution so far that let us do that.

I've probably gone on too long here, but I do think we could help you.

-eric
http://www.enkiconsulting.net

[Murat Aktihanoglu]

thanks a lot for the responses.
Enki sounds great, I'll look into it more.
And Hank, thanks for the heads-up on the AWS persistent-storage.
best,
Murat

http://unype.com?tour=9 (New York tour)
http://m.unype.com (mobile)
917 656 9309