Archive for the ‘How To’ Category
Monday, September 24th, 2012 by Kole Hicks
If you’re familiar with cloud infrastructure and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), you probably understand the substantial benefits that come along with deploying infrastructure in the public cloud: things like “utility billing and on-demand availability,” “elastic benefits that let you scale resources up and down based on demand,” and “the ability to rapidly move and redeploy workloads as needed.” This flexibility is why we originally brought GoGrid’s hourly pay-as-you-go Cloud Servers to market. They’re perfect for specific cases like these:
- Periodic workloads that only run for a few hours, days, or weeks during a given billing cycle
- Short-term, project-based workloads where term commitments aren’t desirable
- Short-term spikes in workload where demand is erratic and being able to scale resources up and down quickly are desirable
- Development and test workloads that require rapid iteration and redeployment of resources
- Proof of concept workloads where instant access to resources and the ability to quickly change technology are key
Customers with steady-state and long-term workloads don’t always need this hourly flexibility, however. And that’s why GoGrid has developed prepaid monthly, semiannual, and annual Cloud Server products. Prepaid Cloud Servers are less flexible, but they do offer significant cost savings in exchange for the term commitment. The shortest prepaid term GoGrid offers is a monthly prepaid Cloud Server and the longest term is an annual prepaid Cloud Server.
If you run a constant workload during a given month, a prepaid term server is probably a better solution than an hourly server. Again, the tradeoff here is flexibility. Prepaid servers are ideal for:
- Steady-state workloads where demand is constant
- Workloads that tend to grow rather than contract
- Production applications where you can plan for demand in advance
For example, imagine you run an eCommerce website. You know you always need three servers to run your operations throughout the year. During the holiday season, however, you know demand is likely to spike. Your deployment of annual servers going into the holiday would look something like this:
(more…) «How To Optimize Cloud Server Workloads to Maximize Efficiency»
Tags: Cloud Server, cloud.cloud computing, eCommerce, IaaS, long-term, optimize, project-based, scalable, test & dev, use case, workload
Posted in Cloud Computing, Cloud Server, Features, General, GoGrid, Hosting, How To, Public Cloud | 2 Comments »
Thursday, July 19th, 2012 by Michael Sheehan
Let me preface this post by saying, I am NOT a Linux guru. In fact, I consider myself to be a newbie when it comes to the intricacies of Linux. I probably know enough to be dangerous, at least dangerous to the server. So, I’m writing this post with the following disclaimer: Don’t ask me for any details on the “why” or how to do what I’m outlining below differently. But since I figured that lots of you are like me, I wanted to share.
Since I’m a Linux newbie, you’ll probably understand why I wanted to write this post though. I’m not a command line junkie—GUIs are much more my thing. But when it comes to running a server that is speedy and high performance with low overhead (e.g., doing away with GUIs), you’re probably looking at various Linux distros. What I wanted to do was set up a basic Linux system running a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack that also had a web-interface and some added security controls.
The great thing about doing this type of experimentation in the cloud is that I can create essentially a Dev & Test environment where I can spin up a server in minutes, install software, configure it, and test everything out. Then if it doesn’t work the way I want it to, I can tear it down and start again from scratch. The cloud lets you do this quickly, easily, and inexpensively.
In this tutorial, you can basically have the entire configuration up and running in the GoGrid cloud in less than an hour and only spend about $0.25 to test this out (assumes a 2 GB server running for 1 hour at $0.12/GB RAM/hr.)
Here’s what we’re using:
- CentOS 6.0 (64-bit) – with 2 GB RAM
- Webmin – web-based interface for sysadmins for UNIX that lets users set up user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing, and a whole lot more
- ConfigServer Firewall & Security (CFS) – a Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI) firewall, login/intrusion detection, and security application for Linux servers
(more…) «How to Install LAMP, Webmin & ConfigServer Security & Firewall on a CentOS 6.0 GoGrid Cloud Server»
Tags: Apache, CentOS, ConfigServer, CSF, firewall, GoGrid, GUI, harden server, How To, LAMP, Linux, MySQL, Perl, PHP, secure server, Security, Server Management, Webmin
Posted in Cloud Computing, Cloud Server, General, GoGrid, How To, Linux, Open Source, Public Cloud, Security | 5 Comments »
Monday, July 9th, 2012 by Rupert Tagnipes
Basho is a GoGrid partner and responsible for the open-source Riak project. If you are not familiar with Riak, it is a well regarded open-source distributed database. It was built off of the Dynamo concept so it is often compared to Cassandra and Amazon Dynamo DB.
Riak is used as a fast, fault-tolerant distributed database. Companies like Mozilla use it for storing and analyzing beta testing results. Mozilla needed a solution to help improve the user experience and that would allow them to store large amounts of data very quickly. Another example of a company using Riak is Bump which uses Riak to scale and manage massive amounts of data sent between it’s millions of users. Riak is used to store elements of past user conversations so that communication history is readily accessible to users.
Basho Riak version 1.1.4 is now available as a GoGrid Community Server Image (CGSI). You can find it when you launch a virtual machine and search for “Riak”. This image is available in all our data centers. This CGSI contains the open source version so support is only available via the community site and will not have all the features present in the Enterprise version. However, you can use this image to either run a proof of concept (POC) of Riak to see if it will meet your needs or to run a small cluster. These will run on GoGrid’s high performance VMs which have been shown to have significant performance advantages over other cloud implementations.
Why is GoGrid faster?
(more…) «Create a Basho Riak Cluster on GoGrid»
Tags: analytics, basho, Big Data, cGSI, GoGrid Server Image, GSI, NOSQL, partner, riak, Storage
Posted in Big Data, Cloud Computing, GoGrid, How To, Images, Open Source, Partners, Public Cloud, Storage | No Comments »
Thursday, May 10th, 2012 by Michael Sheehan
Cloud Computing is fantastic! Where else can you provision infrastructure on the fly, scale it up (add more CPU/RAM/Storage) and out (add more instances of cloud servers) and grow your infrastructure based on your business demands. At GoGrid, we believe in making complex infrastructure easy by providing you with tools to create, manage and scale your GoGrid cloud infrastructure using our web-based portal or programmatic API. But did you know that you can also create and manage your GoGrid cloud infrastructure while you are on the go using your iPhone? Back in 2010, we launched our iPhone application and we designed it to scale as we added new data centers. The application fully supports our San Francisco, Ashburn and Amsterdam data centers simply because we built the app on top of our API.
Are you a mobile apps developer? I would love to see what magic you can do with the GoGrid API in making the next generation Android or iPad application. Feel free to leave a comment on this post.
So, how do you set up the GoGrid iPhone application once you have downloaded it from the iTunes App Store? It’s pretty easy so I wanted to show the steps on setting it up in this article.
Create an API Key within the GoGrid Web Portal
The first step it to create an API key within the GoGrid web portal. You need to have a GoGrid account for this. (For those who are new to GoGrid and want to test it out specifically with the iPhone application, go to the GoGrid sign-up page and in the “Promo Code” field, enter “GGiPhone1″ and receive a $100 service credit!) (more…) «How To Control your Cloud Infrastructure Using the GoGrid iPhone Application»
Tags: API, API key, cloud, control, Developer, GoGrid, IaaS, infrastructure, iOS, iPhone, manage, mobile, mobile application, Shared Secret
Posted in API, Cloud Computing, Cloud Server, Features, General, GoGrid, How To, iPhone, Load Balancer, Public Cloud | No Comments »
Monday, March 26th, 2012 by Zack Gilman
It’s been no secret to us in the high-performance, web server in-crowd that NGINX (pronounced “engine-x”) has been taking the webhosting world by storm for the last several years; *sites like WordPress, Facebook, Hulu, Github, SourceForge and more have been offloading some or many functions onto NGINX. I had originally been exposed to NGINX whilst researching for a higher-performance web server that was 64-bit friendlier than Apache, and that was did not use single threads. Apache has an enormous memory footprint on 64-bit systems and is a single-threaded application.
NGINX is a very flexible HTTP server that can also serve as a reverse proxy, load balancer, caching server, and an IMAP/POP3 proxy. Unlike Apache, however, the configuration is a little bit more involved and can be a big change for Apache loyalists.
In this is example, NGINX will be configured as a full webserver with PHP support. My goal when conjuring this project was to make a pre-configured Community GSI on the GoGrid Exchange with as little modification as possible to ensure a “pure” environment. If you’re anything like me, you might tremble at the thought of even using a typical, pre-configured server with a LAMP stack; I personally like setting things up from scratch, but there’ve been plenty of situations where I would’ve preferred a pre-configured solution. Hopefully I can capture the essence of my intentions.
One thing I should note before I get started is that NGINX does not have a module for PHP the way Apache does; PHP must be run using the FastCGI methodology. Much like the way you would pass requests to a Java container or reverse proxy, so must we for PHP.
The first thing I should mention is that I’m using the EPEL and IUS repositories to for the latest versions of NGINX and PHP-FPM. IUS is the official repository for RHEL/CentOS as referenced by PHP.net. Using these 2 repositories will not alter any existing packages on your system.
(more…) «Speeding Things Up in the Cloud with NGINX»
Tags: Apache, cGSI, Community Server Image, engine-x, GoGrid, How To, HTTP server, IaaS, infrastructure as a service, NGINX, performance, PHP, tutorial
Posted in Cloud Computing, General, GoGrid, GoGrid Exchange, How To, Images, Public Cloud | No Comments »
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