I have wordpress application running on my EC2 - AWS. I haven't decide which one is Amazon RDS or my own database on different hosting. Which one is the cheapest to use? Let's say I have my own MySQL database from Lunarpages or Bluehost hosting, to allow my wordpress on EC2 instance to connect/remote to my database on Lunarpages not allow my wordpress to connect remote to Amazon RDS. Which one is the cheapest to use? I heard people saying when you use Amazon RDS is very expensive, so I thought maybe to save costs to allow my wordpress to connect to my own database not Amazon RDS for wordpress. I don't know it is true or not. I don't know how it performance well. Which one is the best one. Any suggestion appreciated. Thank you.
I don't agree with that. In amazon AWS, the first thing you do is set up a virtual private network and create the corresponding network access interfaces. My experience working with heavy CMSs is that the architecture is much more stable with EC2 + RDS, each in one instance. In addition RDS has automated version maintenance and it is much more difficult to fail or suffer a crash, as opposed to a mysql or similar, running on the same virtual machine.
Also in terms of speed and performance, working with this scheme for example in wordpress, the system flies, the speed is much higher and appreciable even with small machines.
Running on a different hosting will cause extra latency.
Let's do the math on AWS RDS for the smallest instances (taking eu-west-1 region as example)
Running on RDS: db.t2.micro $0.018 per hour, or $12.96 per month for RDS. Free the first year under AWS free tier.
Running on EC2: t2.micro (You configure MySQL and backups, ...), $0.0126 per hour, or $9.07 per month. Free the first year under AWS free tier
If your application is small enough, you could host both your database and your application on the same machine (solution 2)
Performance wise is not good to have database on a totally different network of the website hosted itself. It'll delay. Imagine if you have a lot of calls, it'll multiply the delay.
You can host a local database on the EC2 it'self, this would be the best choice.
Related
I'm writing a Qt/C++ application and i plan to add a network part with socket connection to a server implemented in Qt also.
If i host locally the server there is no real problem.
But if i want to share my application (client part) with some people and then be sure my server is always running, the best way would be to have a distant server.
Could you give me some clue to do it ? It's not still clear for me for steps to follow in this case.
Is it a better way for that ?
Can i find free hosting ?
Thanks a lot! :-)
There are generally 3 options:
1. Local hosting
This is server running at Your physical location. You can set it clearly as You want and the server will do whatever You want. But must be turned on the whole time, when there is no other work it will just consume power. Also You must get all the hardware (server components), software for running (Operation system), network device and connection (some router, which needs to have special set-up [NAT, port-forward, ...], speed and reachability of the internet connection) and most likely also some security device/SW (firewalls or so).
This is best idea for basic developement and testing. But once the service should work for public audience, it is not really worth to run server Yourself.
2. Remote hosting (virtualized or dedicated server)
This option was the top in last 20-30 years, where all the Web developers and App developers were putting their software on some prepared server. Dedicated is physical server running at some providers' location, who are lending You the hardware (and maybe some license for OS/other SW). Virtualized machine is just 1 hardware piece (server) with multiple virtual servers on it (more clients running on same hardware).
This got generally benefits as the networking/security/hardware issues are being carried out by the hosting owner. You are just borrowing some diskspace and computer time/performance. Normally the company will provide whole server, on which You can set up several services, run multiple protocols, etc..
Ideal solution for webs and single/few (not much) instances of server application(s).
3. Cloud hosting
This is the newest technology at the moment (alive around 10-15 years [eg. AWS running since 2006, Azure since 2010]). Datacenter owners (from 2. point) get better and created some applications on the servers, which will do all the work for You (mostly automatically). In few clicks the servers are running and application can be deployed, used database engines, web pages, IOT hubs, ... quite lot of stuff. Benefits are clearly that You just have to spent minimum of time to set up things and they will run. With high uptime (eg.: 99.9995%).
Difference between dedicated & cloud: On dedicated server there can be put almost any OS which fits the needs, run just services You want, have full control. In cloud solution, You don't have so much of "physical" control and the data moreless live somewhere in Datacenters all over the world. But generally it is more scalable solution and once Your app will be used by lot of users from public sector, this is best way to go.
Common ideology:
The most common solution is that when You develop, You create local server on which You deploy, test, improve. Once stable, order a server either on cloud or as dedicated/virtual machine and deploy it there. Some developers knows that their App will run on cloud services from the very beggining so they order it and start developing against it, but in most cases there is no need for that.
I just bought a WD my cloud ex2.
The reason I bought this over the white original my cloud is that this machine can produce a public IP for FTP transfer, becoming a true cloud based storage. But i also want to free myself from the chains of expensive web-hosting and it makes me feel even more pathetic because I have a storage device and I'm still buying storage for my websites. I build asp.net websites using WebMatrix, and have a SQL Server Database. Can my storage device run ASP.NET? I don't know much about Windows Server, but does that have to be installed in the myCloud? Would there be any way to do so?
Thank you.
No. Not an MS box. But you can use MySQL and recode your asp.net to php. Another great choice would be to get a free (for 1 year) Amazon Web Services EC2 instance. You can run a small MS Server there and keep your stuff in ASP.net
To handle high traffic, I'm planning to scale out, run my web application (WordPress based) on some EC2 instances (I'm very new to AWS). The instances need to work on the same data (images, videos...).
I am thinking about using S3 as the storage for this shared data.
My questions are:
If I use S3, do I need to write extra codes for my application to upload and get data to/from S3? Or there is a magic way to mount EC2 instances to S3, and after that EC2 instances can access S3 as accessing the local storage?
I've heard that S3 is a bit slow since it is accessed through web services (if users upload files and it takes time to upload the files to S3). So is there any better way for storing shared data?
I've read some documents about the ability of scaling of Amazon EC2. But none of them mentions about how to handle shared data. Any help is highly appreciated. Thanks.
There is no native facility to 'mount' an S3 bucket as storage to an EC2 instance, although there are several 3rd-party apps which offer mechanisms to make S3 storage available as a virtual drive or repository. Most of them offer a preset amount of free storage and then a tiered charging mechanism for larger amounts - Google for 'S3 storage interface' and take a look.
Whether you write code to use S3 through the API or use an interface layer, there will always be some latency between your app and the storage. That's a fact of physics and there's nothing you can do to eliminate the delay, because the S3 repository is not local to the EC2 cluster - so you will never achieve 'local' storage access speeds.
An alternative might be to use EBS which is local to your EC2 instance - it has different properties to S3 (for example, it does not offer edge locations for regionally-localised access) but is much faster for application use because it is inside the EC2 cluster and mounted as local storage.
You could mount S3 bucket onto all your EC2 instances. It's a 2-way mount so all your files will be synchronized. You could use s3f3 to do the mounting.
I used this guide and set up mine pretty quick: Mount S3 onto EC2
If you are then concerned about speed, you can use Amazon ElastiCache or even use EBS as a cache drive.
For starts you question lacks some details about your application architecture, but there are some possibilities.
First, if you project is medium-sized you could use GlusterFS on your main nodes as servers and clients at the same time (using native or NFS protocol), RDS *Multi-AZ* MySQL instance for DataBase. CloudFront as CDN with CDN linker or W3TC plugins. Also, put an ELB in front.
In this particular case I would recommend a couple c3.large instances at least.
Second, when your project would grow - you should make instance AMI and created an auto-scaling group that would just connect to your main storage and compute instances. (Also consider lifting compute load from these rather small instances).
Things to consider additionally:
Great WordPress article about WordPress clusters for is http://harish11g.blogspot.ru/2012/01/scaling-wordpress-aws-amazon-ec2-high.html
Alternative to GlusterFS solution could be Ceph File System
You also could (or maybe should) you SSD cache (for example flashcache) for that GlusterFS volume.
We have a web-application product that we sell to companies that is hosted at our servers.
The product contains couple of web applications, windows services and SQL server db.
Right now we have only one client that uses our product. We have two servers - one for the web apps and services and other for the db.
In order to add the product to another client, we have to 'duplicate' all the apps and db and run in separately.
As we started expanding and some companies will require more server power then others, I need to plan the servers infrastructure.
Having two servers for each client sounds ridiculous. Hosting costs will be huge. What will happen when I'll have 10 clients? And probably some servers will take more power than others, leaving servers using 30% from their capacity while others use 70%.
One thing I really care about is separating the DB from each product so in case of server compromise, only one db will be at risk.
So... I thought about Virtual Machines...
Does it sounds right?
Do I need two super servers to hold virtual machine instances? (one for web and other for db?)
What about Load balancing / etc..?
Will it require more maintenance time only because I use virtual machines?
Are there any hardware recommendations?
Any help will be appreciated
Many thanks
Virtual Machines is definitely the safest way to separate clients and will allow you the flexibility to allocate a specific percentage of resources to specific clients.
However, using separate processes on the same physical machine will perform better (but not always significantly) and will allow more dynamic use of resources (i.e., if one spikes, it will use the resources it needs). This setup will not allow you to control the resource allocation nearly as easily though. You'll also have to build your own monitoring tools to see and analyze what processes (clients) are using what resources (piggyback on perfmon).
Using separate processes also is dangerous if your application wasn't designed for this. Anywhere the application caches data on the file system or accesses anything besides memory and the database needs to be thoroughly scrubbed to make sure data from clients is not co-mingled or shared.
Separate virtual machines is more work to manage--each one is pretty much like it's own computer. So you have to manage all the VM's plus the physical machine.
You may also want to consider hosting in a more dynamic environment like Amazon AWS or Microsoft's Azure which will allow you to more easily scale up/down as necessary than a VM at a traditional host.
My Company is running several international websites for selling insurance products.
Our current setup is a Webfarm with multiple Loadbalanced Webservers hosting our ASP.NET applications. The backend is a single - yet powerful - SQL Server. (all in one data center)
Our network admins want to move to virtual servers running on VMWare.
Scenarios could be
Webfarm: Multiple standard webservers, Loadbalanced (current setup), Session state on SQL Server
Virtual Webfarm: Multiple virtual servers, loadbalanced on one physical VMWare Host, Session state on SQL Server
2.a same as above but with multiple physical hosts
Single Virtual Webserver: One big powerful virtual webserver, no loadbalancing required, session state can be kept in process
There is a big hype around virtualization and I can see the benefits, but have no experience with this. I cannot tell what issues we will face and to what we should pay special attention.
Does anyone have experience with such a virtual setup?
What are general recommendations?
I tend towards 2a. I am afraid of having all webservers on one single physical machine.
Many thanks in advance to share your thoughts.
There are three reasons to use more than one webserver for an application:
Scaling - More grunt is required than one machine can provide
Reliability - Website should keep running in case of failure (a. hardware b. software)
Prioritization - One of the webservers takes on heavy work (perhaps scheduled tasks) leaving the other to respond to client requests quickly.
Marrying that up to you scenarios:
Scenario 1 provides 1, 2, 3
Scenario 2 provides 2b (perhaps 2a if it is fully hardware redundant (doubt it))
Scenario 2a provides 1, 2
Scenario 3 provides none of the above
Advantages of Virtual Hosting:
Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) on big cluster serving multiple purposes is cost effective
New servers can be created quickly if needed
Redundant hardware is easier to justify if the cost is shared among many applications
Disadvantages:
Other virtual machines may suck away your CPU/Disk IO capacity
IMHO there is little point to load balancing multiple virtual machines on the same virtual server.
Robert's pretty much covered it all, I'm mostly just adding a note to say that at least one of our clients is currently running with option 2a.
So we have multiple loadbalanced web servers running on a couple of VM hosts, talking to a non-virtualised SQL cluster - this works quite well for them.
One other advantage of virtualisation is that it allows you to more fully utilise your hardware - however, you need to be aware that if you're running your virtual host at around 90% capacity with multiple VMs, you've not got a lot of spare capacity for any traffic spikes - if you're not expecting any, then great, but if you are, you'll need to have something in place to cope.
I agree with all of the above answers, and I actually work at a webhost. :-) If you're using multiple load-balanced webservers now then I can only assume the reason for it is either
Hardware Redundancy: If a single app server fails then those sessions are lost, but the app keeps running on the other servers and users can immediately re-connect.
or
Application Load Distribution (it's late so I can't think of a better name): Your traffic dictates that you have multiple app servers since all of your users would crash a single app server.
If #1 is the reason, then going to VMWare defeats the purpose since you only have one server supporting everything, and in case of hard drive crash, etc, you are down while it is repaired. If #2 is the reason then a VMWare based solution MAY work, however keep in mind that the hardware you'd use would almost necessarily be of a higher caliber than what you're currently using. So you maybe get more bang for your buck, but you STLL lose the redundancy that multiple physical machines gave you.
Now, you could always combine the two by having multiple physical machines all running VMWare, but that adds a level of complexity to things that you may not necessarily want either.
It doesn't sound like there would be any tangible benefit from running multiple virtual servers on the same physical host, you're just adding overhead. Unless I'm missing something with the way you've described the setup, there wouldn't be any benefit at all from moving to VMware - unless you're looking at taking advantage of features such as VMotion
VMware is most useful for consolidating underutilized hardware. If your hardware is running at near-capacity during peak periods then you don't want to run multiple VMs on the one machine.
There are benefits to Virtualization but your network admins need to prove that there is a benefit for your company before you even consider switching. I would say if you have multiple apps running on dedicated servers with low traffic (i.e. each app has it's own physical server) then sure, Virtualize. If you have one app over many servers, then don't.
You should be able to use virtual machine hosts with multiple vm per host and load balance across all of them.
Microsoft is doing this with msdn and technet http://virtualization.info/en/news/2008/05/microsoft-migrates-msdn-and-technet-on.html.