I have a social networking site which is almost ready. On the site people would upload images and put information about themselves for their profile and would also post messages (which can include images). I am wondering exactly how to proceed (hosting, servers etc.), I am a relative beginner at all this stuff so I am not sure exactly what route to take. I am thinking of maybe hosting from home initially from my Personal Computer and maybe expand by acquiring servers to stack (which I am not exactly sure how to do honestly) if we grow. Since the site is aimed at a small proportion of the population, I am not expecting huge growth in traffic but I want to be prepared for spikes, albeit small ones. I was wondering if maybe it is possible to just host it off my computer and store the the database (MySQL) in a removable disk along with the images. I was also thinking about cloud hosting, which seems to be the most common, but I was wondering if that really is the best thing to do, given this is a social networking site. I know this question is very vague and broad, but since I am a beginner I really have no clue how to proceed. What is the best thing to do? Thank you so much!
Hosting from personal computers is a bad idea for few reasons - your internet bandwidth limits the speed of the website, you need to maintain 24/7 interest connectivity/ power and all the resources.
I suggest you to start with AWS, get a free account of AWS, which comes with a basic level machine free for 12 months, more details here (https://aws.amazon.com/activate/).
Deploy a machine in EC2,
Install the webserver and MySQL tools into the machine
Host your files in this machine.
Refer this machine public ip to your domain service provider(where you bought your domain. Example: Godaddy)
Deploying a machine and configuring the server takes a while, but its worth, it and the best part is its FREE for 12 months, so you need not worry about the pricing, connectivity and bandwidth.
Also when you think the traffic is more, you can upgrade your server with few clicks with no config changes.
Related
I was really satisfied by the billing structure of cloud functions. They only charge during the runtime of a function based on how much resources it consumes. I am looking for a similar solution for my game servers.
I checked various cloud hosting options like VMs but all providers like digital ocean, google, amazon etc. charge even when there is no load on VM (and I completely understand the reason for that).
I am looking for an option where I can deploy my game server and will charge me only when it will consume resources(based on how much resources it consume) and won't charge (or a minimal charge) when the server is idle. It's like it will auto scale based on the current load.
Thankyou in advance for all the answers.
You can try Squids.io(https://squids.io/), a fully managed database service provider allows you to power off when your server is idle, and you can restart it at anytime of your choice. Plus, it charges you no management fees.
I have created an OPCUA server with eclipse milo that is installed in the same machine where the clients are installed, so the communication works fast and reliably.
I did a bit of sniffing with wireshark to see how much communication involves under the hood and apparently there is a lot going on when monitoring variable, alarms, etc....
So I am thinking what issues I may expect in terms of performance and scalability if the server gets deployed in the cloud. I have seen that people talks about OPCUA cloud services, but not being this a hot topic is hard to foresee what challenges may come, and how well it scales and performs.
I would imagine that OPCUA uses sticky sessions, which means that you only can support a max number of users/requests, so dynamic scaling may not be an alternative right?
I tried the samples provides by eclipse milo, which are stored somewhere in the network, and it took long timeto connect to it. If that is the performance one may expect then the perception of the service for non-technical users would be that it does not work well.
Is the cloud a right place to use OPCUA considering the network overhead? Any recommendation to stick to local networks (intranet) only and skip the cloud?
Any feedback would be appreciated, thanks!
If you wanted to get into more detail and share Wireshark captures we might be able to go over parameters that would reduce traffic.
If bandwidth is a concern because you're using cellular or other constrained connections then sure, OPC UA may not be the best fit.
I'm curious what kind of delays or latency you experienced running the examples - connecting over the internet generally does not take very long, so perhaps you were also measuring the time it took to compile and start the example or there was something going on with your network.
So I am interested in server PCs and I want to buy one, and I will choose very powerful. But I don't know how to establish the hard disk to be connected to the internet. I want other people to see it when they write it's domain in the search. I am just searching for advice.
I went back over your question and this thread and this is what I recommend. You are looking to create a hosting environment for others from what I am understanding. Regardless the platform you select (linux or windows) having a beefy machine is going to be key to this. I would recommend at a minimum for hardware the following specifications. I recommend building a dedicated server with multiple Quad Core processors, 32 GB RAM, 2 or more TB Disk, with provision for backups. If you call say Dell or one of the other big server providers, they can custom-create a build for you that will accommodate your needs. That configuration would be a start; your final build may be beefier according to your needs and budget.
This is rather a set of questions than one very specific question. In the last couple weeks/days I puzzled together information regarding how to properly host a JAVA PLAY application "in the cloud", as lots of this information is scattered over different services, I felt like gathering up all these small pieces to one, because lots of things are important to be seen in full context. However, I moved my considerations to the bottom of the question, as they are mainly my opinions and subjective findings, which I don't want to be held responsible for. If I got something wrong, please don't hesitate to point that out.
Hosting Java PLAY + MySQL on AWS for world wide accessibility
Our Scenario: we have a quite straight forward application written within the Java PLAY framework (https://www.playframework.com/), working on iOS and Android as well as with a backend-system (for administration, content management and API), storing data in a MySQL DB. While most of the users' interactions with the server is quick and easy (login, sync some data) there are also some more data-intensive tasks (download some <100mb data zips to the mobile phone, upload a couple of mb to the server). Therefore we were looking for a solution to properly provide users far away from our servers with reasonable response times. The obvious next step was hosting in the cloud.
Hosting setup within AWS:
Horizontal scaling: for the start, only 1 EC2 instance with our app will be running in eu-1a. We will need to evaluate how much resources one instance actually requires, if more instances are needed and if more instances would actually benefit to quicker response times.
Horizontal scaling across regions: once the app generates heavy user load from another region, the whole EC2 instance should be duplicated and put to another region, running a db read replica (see Setting up a globally available web app on amazon web services and https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/aws/cross-region-read-replicas-for-amazon-rds-for-mysql/ ).
Vertical scaling of EC2 instances: in recent tests of the old hosting setup, the database proved to be the bottleneck rather than the play app and its server's hardware specifications. Therefore it is not yet fully clear how much vertical scaling would affect response times. If a t2.micro instance serves as good as a m3.xlarge instance, of course we would rather climb our way up from the bottom here.
Vertical scaling of RDS: we will need to estimate how much traffic hits the DB server and what CPU/RAM/etc will be required. Probably we will work our way up here aswell.
Global Redirection: done using Amazon Route 53 (?). A user from Tokio should be redirected to the EC2 instance running in Asia; a user from Rome to the EC2 instance in Europe. This does not only affect API calls within the app, but also content delivery (in both directions).
Open Questions regarding the setup
Is this setup conclusive? Am I missing crucial components?
Regarding global redirection: is Amazon Route 53 the right tool? How does it differ from CloudFront (which strikes me to be purely for content / media distribution?).
How do I define correct data/api endpoints for my app? Of course I don't want to define the database endpoint of a db read replica during app deployment. Will this also happen during the AR53 (question 2) setup? Same goes for API calls, of course the app should direct it's calls to https://myurl.com/api and from there it should be redirected. Is this realistic?
I would highly appreciate all kinds of thoughts (!), also regarding the background info written below. If you can point me to further reading to solve my questions on my own, I am also very thankful - there is simply a huge load of information regarding this, but this makes it hard to narrow the answers down. I do have knowledge in hosting/servers, but I am pretty sure there are true experts out there waiting to slap me with knowledge. :)
Background-Information
Current Hosting Setup: a load balancer distributes the traffic on 2 root linux servers, both of them running the PLAY app, one of them also holding the MySQL installation.
The current hosting setup has 3 big flaws:
No vertical scalability: the hosting company would take money for each scaling step. Currently the servers are running idle, but if the app booms, we could run short on capacity quickly. Running idle is still paid as if permanently under full load. This is expensive!
No deployment support: currently, we connect through SSH, manually deploy the correct folders to the file system, recompile on the server, set privileges, apply database evolutions; do the same for the second server (with different db connection parameters). What could possibly go wrong. ;)
No worldwide availability: to set up another server in another region of the world would mean a huge effort. To have a synchronized replica of our DB can be done, but once again deploying would mean downtime, room for errors and therefore time and money.
Hosting Options for Java PLAY:
There are lot of different blog posts about this. In short:
AWS: Amazon Web Services is one of the first places you start looking. Here you get everything that's possible, at a flexible price. You set yourself up an EC2 instance, a MySQL RDS and you're good to go - all of this in the free tier, so you can experiment, play around, test your stuff.
Microsoft Azure: similar to AWS regarding pricing and possibilities. However, I did not dive into setting up and deploying our application for test purposes.
Heroku: super easy deployment from within PLAY, scalable servers. However (on the first glance?) lacks possibility to supply remote regions with high speed content.
Jelastic: even easier deployment from within PLAY / IntelliJ IDEA. You push your app image to jelastic, jelastic distributes it further to their infrastructure providers.
RedHat OpenShift (https://www.openshift.com/): sounds promising, yet not as complete as AWS.
Lots of choices and possible setups/prices. Especially after finding out about deployment using boxfuse (https://cloudcaptain.sh/) I made my choice for AWS, as it offers absolutely all we need from 1 source. Boxfuse has low monthly costs but is perfectly integrated into AWS. Scaling is supported as well as the 3 common environments (dev/test/prod). Support is outstanding.
The setup looks good. I would however make one change: your large up- & downloads. As mobile speeds may not be ideal, have your app serve long-running requests is something you should avoid as this will needlessly tie up server threads. Instead consider having users upload and download straight from S3 using presigned URLs. You can then later add CloudFront to the mix when it makes financial sense to do so.
R53 will work just fine for picking the best server(s) for each end user.
For EC2 consider having an ELB + Auto-Scaling Group setup. Even just for a single instance you get the benefit of permanent health monitoring and auto-respawns. If you expect more load you can then auto-scale based on your expected bottleneck (cpu, network i/o). This will give you a more autonomous and robust setup than manually having to scale up and down based on your own monitoring analysis (even though the scaling part is very easy if you stick with immutable infrastructure & blue/green deployments like what Boxfuse offers).
Your focus on vertical server scaling might not serve you well on AWS. I would start thinking about horizontal scaling of app servers behind an Elastic Load Balancer, and possibly look into Elastic Beanstalk.
I'm not sure you can setup a read replica in another region via RDS, you might have to set that up via MySQL servers running on standard EC2 instances. And even if you can, that's going to be some expensive and high-latency data transfer.
If file uploads and downloads are all you are worried about, you just need to put CloudFront (Amazon's CDN service) in front of your application, and allow it to handle file uploads and downloads via its global edge servers. You could even do this without moving your entire application into AWS. I would recommend reading this blog post as a start.
My company is hosting a few separate, but related, moderately hit, web sites. Accordingly, a production database server, staging database server, production web server, staging web server, etc are needed. My question is, should we invest in physically separate servers for each of our needs, or should we put that money together and invest in a much higher end server and virtualize all of the aforementioned servers? Which route would you guys decide on, and why?
That depends on a lot of things, here are the main considerations.
If you have a lot of servers with low to moderate usage, virtualization should generally save you money on hardware, power, and floorspace. There is a tipping point, however, based on the overhead of the VM layer itself. Honestly, you will have to experiment to find the right cost/performance balance on this. I am sure the VM vendors would be happy to help you with the math.
The downside is that virtualization creates a single point of failure. If that box fails, you have downtime for all of your servers. Having them separate makes it far less likely for everything to take a dive at once.
You certainly want physical separation between the development and the production servers. You shouldn't ever have to worry that something you do in dev could bring down the machine on which production is hosted. And, there are some problems in development that really require either a hard reset of the physical machine or a ludicrous work-around to avoid a hard reset.
As for production web server and production database, you're not really introducing any new points of failure by virtualizing them on the same machine, particularly if you can colocate a static version of the site on another server. For any modern web site of even moderate complexity, database failure is web site failure anyway.
From my experience, for low or moderate usage a VM is the way to go - if you get just one very powerful server instead on several moderately powerful servers you save money, power and space and make the application faster at the same time because it's running on faster hardware.
A VM also have same another nice advantages, if the server hardware fails you can load the same VM on different physical hardware and continue running like nothing happened (you do have full backups, don't you?) and you can take a copy of the actual production server and run it in isolation on a development machine to debug those annoying bug that only appear in production.
But I would put the development (and maybe testing) servers on a different physical machine than production, you need to make sure no matter what stupid mistake you made in development it wouldn't take down the production server.