Is this how time normally passes? Really slowly, in the right order?

Saturday, August 30

Geek

The Lane At The End Of The Ocean

Digital Ocean are a rather neat VPS provider.  The fatal flaw with VPSes has always been I/O performance: You can't virtualise IOPS.

Couldn't.

SSDs.

To unpack that a little, an expensive top-of-the-line enterprise disk drive can deliver about 250 I/O operations per second (IOPS).  Any SSD can handle tens of thousands.*

So if you throw away the spinning rust and use nothing but SSDs, VPSes actually work.  And since all the complexity and expense came from trying to make the spinning rust work, rather than the VPSes themselves, this is actually a very cost-effective approach.

Case in point: A Digital Ocean "droplet" with one virtual CPU, 512MB of RAM, 20GB of storage, and 1TB of bandwidth costs just $5 per month.

My physical servers cost rather more than that - but then again, they have 32GB of RAM, 2TB of disk, and 240GB of SSD (all RAID-1) each.  If you need 32GB of RAM, 2TB of disk, and 240GB of SSD, a physical server from a mid-tier provider is still going to be cheaper than Digital Ocean.  But if you want to quickly pop a server into existence to try out, say, CentOS 7, a Digital Ocean droplet is hard to beat.  Not only is it set up to your specifications in under a minute, but you're billed by the hour, up to a monthly cap - so if you only need something for a few hours, you only need to pay a few cents.**

Except that they are not - at least yet - in Australia.  San Francisco, New York, London, Amsterdam, Singapore.  Singapore isn't a terrible location to reach from Sydney, but it's not great either.

If only there were a provider in Australia that offered similar SSD-based VPSes -

Oh.

That were priced as low as -

Oh.

That was run by someone I'm familiar with, like the people behind Mammoth - 

Oh.

Binary Lane isn't as polished as Digital Ocean (yet), but they're a lot more flexible; you can select the number of CPUs, amount of memory, disk, and bandwidth all independently, and you can adjust them at will after the fact as well.  

The one downside is that this being Australia, bandwidth is STILL FUCKING NIGHTMARE EXPENSIVE with the basic $5 plan with 200GB of bundled bandwidth turning into an $85 monster if you want the 1TB that Digital Ocean offer.  Though it wasn't that long ago that I was paying that much for bandwidth out of a second-tier provider in the US.***

Oh, and they're in Brisbane, which means a 30ms ping instead of 15ms I got for my old Sydney-based VPS.

Edit: Vultr provide a similar service at a similar price with nodes in Seattle, Los Angeles, Dallas (where we are currently located), Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, New Jersey (where our backup server lives), London, Amsterdam, Paris, Frankfurt (currently sold out), Tokyo, and Sydney.  (Yay!)  Their configurations aren't as flexible as Binary Lane, but their worldwide scope is a big plus.  Going to give them a try as well.

Update: I've now tried out Digital Ocean, Binary Lane, and Vultr.  Digital Ocean is the most polished; Binary Lane the most flexible; Vultr the fastest and the best for global distribution.  So far all of them have worked flawlessly, and they all offer amazing value for money.

Linode have also jumped into the SSD VPS market, with competitive pricing to the three mentioned above.

Then there's Amazon and Google, with page after page of pricing tables.  Meh.

* Sustained random write performance is a fraction of the burst speed, but over the past five years that's improved from "a small fraction" to "a substantial fraction" and is no longer a problem for 99% of users.

** Literally - their VPSes start at 0.7c per hour.

*** Never mind that, I can remember when bandwidth cost me $30 per gigabyte, which rather puts $100 per terabyte in perspective.  Come to think of it, excess bandwidth on my mobile phone still costs $30 per gigabyte.

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Thursday, August 28

Geek

Meanwhiles And Never-weres

more...

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Friday, August 01

Geek

Your MongoDB Has Evolved!

So, I got an email in my inbox about the MongoDB World conference and new features in MongoDB 2.8, and I'm like, yawn, wake me up when you have document-level locking and pluggable storage engines.

And the email is like:
... two new features available in MongoDB 2.8: Document-Level Locking and the Pluggable Storage Engine.
Oh.

Well, then.

ACID transactions too, maybe?  Hmm?

TokuMX is a fork of MongoDB that provides document-level locking and a new storage engine with very effective compression (typically 5:1 vs. standard MongoDB), and ACID transactions on top of that.  It's great.  But it does drop a couple of features from MongoDB (full-text and geospatial indexes), and it turns certain common operations in MongoDB into anti-patterns.  For example, explicit read-modify-write transactions work better on a busy database than MongoDB's built-in atomic operations.*

If MongoDB continue to improve their game and Tokutek improve theirs as well, it's a win-win, because it provides two viable open-source NoSQL databases with a common API.  You can choose one or the other for your implementation-specific requirements, rather than having to deploy multiple databases to fit the needs of one application.  Polyglot storage is red flag that your database isn't there yet.

* Or at least they did, I should take another look with TokuMX 1.5.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:28 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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