Any website on the Internet is subject to a sudden increase of traffic without prior notice. This situation could clog our server if we don’t plan ahead.
Until virtualization and cloud computing came around, scaling meant increasing costs, paying for idle time and using a great deal of resources in terms of hardware and manpower.
Thankfully, with Infrastructure as a Service, that’s a thing of the past.
Our cloud computing platform is really flexible. It allows us to offer all kinds of operating systems and pre-packaged software. We have already added some interesting options, such as Windows and MS-SQL, Nginx/Ruby/Rails and L.A.M.P.
This time we wanted to go further and be a little whimsical, let’s have some fun, why not? So, without further ado, we present you with: Minecraft server image.
Let’s see. We have already added two new images to City Cloud, a L.A.M.P. server and a Windows Server 2008 alongside MS SQL. We have decided to go for a suggestion a user gave us on Twitter (@sandelius).
So, we have created a Ruby image that comes with all the bells and whistles and packed with Nginx, a fast performing web-server.
Here are the details.
Great, so you just created your Linux server on City Cloud. You have chosen to use our LAMP image or you just went and installed Apache, PHP and MySQL yourself.
So far so good, but this is just the beginning. To be able to make your website serve as many requests as possible, it’s important to make a few basic adjustments to the default installation of Apache and MySQL.
We have had Windows 2008 Server images on City Cloud for a while now. We also have Windows 2008 and MS-SQL Server integrated but recently we implemented VirtIO drivers for Windows 2008R2 and according to our tests, the speed improvement is considerable.
So now, in order to save you quite a bit of time and offer you something with good performance, we´ve packaged Windows alongside MS-SQL and VirtIO drivers all-in-one.
Read on to find out the details about it.
Since City Cloud got out of beta, a couple of years ago, we have been steadily adding images and upgrading when necessary. We have added quite a few options in terms of operating systems, we currently have Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Gentoo, Fedora Core, Red Hat Enterprise, FreeBSD and Windows 2008 server.
Images allow you to setup a new VM and have an operating system up and running in a matter of minutes. This saves you a lot of hassle. Now, we are going to go a step further and add something extra.
Read on to find out more.
Background
This week about 1000 servers were affected by an issue in one of our storage nodes. This issue is not related to our issue last year in our Gluster environment. Some of the servers were simply affected by limited performance and some were down for as much as a few hours.
The storage node in question is a straight up a redundant NFS/ZFS solution where we in some cases have used a form of deduplication for better efficiency in actual storage usage. We noticed a performance degradation already on Tuesday which then yesterday (Thursday) culminated in an even greater performance degradation where ultimately many VMs did not get enough I/O performance to stay alive. The deduplication system uses a lot of memory and if there is not enough it will start using disk which simply is not speedy enough to supply the need for City Cloud. This occurance slowed the general disk performance and in turn either slowed machines or took them down.
What will happen going forward
We have had extreme stability in these types of storage nodes in the last 5 years. They offer good value in performance as well and allows us to offer good price/quality to all our customers. we will make sure we remove any type of deduplication that we have used as we do not risk this scenario going forward. To do so we will move a lot of servers off of the storage node in question to a new node which is similar in setup but newer and configured with no deduplication.
We expect this work to happen during February and when a VM is moved it could mean 10-15 minutes of down time. Any such maintenance will of course be scheduled during night time and will be kept to a minimum.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. We will work very hard for it not to happen again.
Thank you for being a customers of our City Cloud service.
Recently we just released a guide to install Debian GNU/Linux from scratch. You can check that guide out, right here.
Since Ubuntu is based off Debian, this guide might have some similarities but it’s useful for those of you who have never used Debian before and want to try Ubuntu directly.
Without further ado, here you have a step-by-step guide on how to install Ubuntu 11.10 Server 64-bit, otherwise known as “Oneiric Ocelot”.
Setting up a new virtual machine on City Cloud is fairly easy. Once you have your account, you just go to the App Center on our control panel and select the operating system you’d like to install. We have many flavors of Windows, Linux and even FreeBSD.
These server templates give you the base install with everything ready to go in a matter of minutes. This is very snappy and convenient, but sometimes you want to install the operating system from scratch. Usually because you want more flexibility, you need to setup an advanced option or you would like to use an ISO image that’s not yet available on the App Center.
On this tutorial, we give you a step by step guide of how to do just that.
So far, our Linux based operating systems in City Cloud have had a slight advantage when it comes to performance. These operating systems have access to a special driver which makes them more integrated in the virtualisation platform which in turn gives them an edge performance vise. We recently insalled the same drivers for Windows so that our customers can get great performance regardless of which OS they choose.
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