Linode Cloud hosting for MySQL database applications??

Portal Home > Knowledgebase > Articles Database > Linode Cloud hosting for MySQL database applications??

Posted by eknow, 01-09-2011, 11:15 AM
I have been using a traditional Linux VPS, fairly low powered for hosting my MySQL database driven application until now. I need to upgrade this hosting as I launch my service to the wider world but don't have much of a budget so the cloud approach appealed as it looks more cost effective, plus I can easily scale with what I find I need rather than commit to an expensive dedicated server. My questions are: 1) Is a Cloud server like Linode offer suitable for this type of application? I looked into things like Rackspace Cloud Sites and they appear to have issues because of the way the servers are replicated 2) Is the headline specs offered by Linode going to achieve similar performance to what I would get with a similar spec of dedicated server? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Posted by EMBRobert, 01-09-2011, 01:04 PM
I have applications and hosting VPSs at Linode and they work great! I actually have migrated most of my dedicated servers to Linode.
Posted by JasonD10, 01-09-2011, 03:50 PM
I think you're on the right track looking for Cloud. Dedicated servers are single points of failure, require added overhead for growth, and can be rather time consuming with vertical scaling. What kind of IO do you have on your MySQL DB? Rackspace Cloud Servers are more similar to a VPS, and may be a better fit than Cloud Sites as Cloud Sites is more or a load balanced managed shared hosting solution. Cloud Servers are going to get you guaranteed, dedicated resources like a Dedicated server. Linode does monitor IO usage of customers and I don't believe it is clearly defined (most hosts don't clearly define IO limits), so you may wish to ask them directly what is considered acceptable. It will probably be a varying amount based on the size of the VPS you buy from them. You would need to ask Linode also about the specific Cloud you would be going on as it would depend on the type of servers they use. Some processor types, such as Nehalem's, are going to be substantially faster than older technology quad core's. But if you're comparing apples to apples with the same processor types, such as Harpertown's for example, then yes it is going to be very close in performance.
Posted by eknow, 01-10-2011, 04:40 PM
Thanks for the replies. I think I will go down the Linode route and will buy in a Linux admin to help me set-up.
Posted by JasonD10, 01-10-2011, 04:44 PM
As a suggestion, you may wish to find a provider who can offer you fully managed hosting. Besides the simplicity of a one-stop shop, the provider is going to be the most familar with their own infrastructure, and have access to the proper parties to both resolve and optimize environments. Rackspace charges ~$188/mo for this (they have an interesting pricing model), but I know other providers can be about half or this or less.
Posted by licensesolutions, 01-24-2011, 01:02 PM
what is the base software that you are using to run your cloud based environment?
Posted by bhavicp, 01-25-2011, 04:03 AM
I thought Linode was just traditional VPS hosting and not a "cloud", fail-over type setup? Ie i thought a Cloud VPS would be more like VPS.net or gigenetcloud
Posted by boskone, 01-25-2011, 10:04 AM
Linode is VPS - not cloud.
Posted by EMBRobert, 01-28-2011, 02:50 AM
They say they are..
Posted by boskone, 01-28-2011, 04:36 AM
Lots of people claim to be cloud these days In my book, if the storage is on the local server and you don't have completely automated migration between servers and auto recovery if a server has a problem, it's not cloud, it's VPS
Posted by fancypocket, 01-28-2011, 05:13 AM
Based on my experience, cloud/vps doesnt have good IO. If you are running small traffic sites, they are fine. If not, go with normal dedicated. Even a SATA server will be faster than cloud/vps.
Posted by boskone, 01-28-2011, 05:44 AM
Clouds vary hugely, newer technology clouds with high performance SAN will outperform local disk or sata SAN every time
Posted by fancypocket, 01-28-2011, 06:18 AM
We tried several cloud providers. Based on our experience, even the high speed SAN isnt as good a normal SATA for real apps. I ran dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync on cloud, the result is around 100-120 MB/s. However, our apps are running slower than normal SATA with 50-60 MB/s.
Posted by boskone, 01-28-2011, 06:34 AM
SO the disk IO was twice the SATA local performance, but your app was slower? Sounds like not enough RAM more so that disk issues...
Posted by humawebdesign, 01-28-2011, 06:58 AM
Dedicated servers are point of failure, it requires added overhead for growth, and can be time consuming. You also need to ask Linode about the specific Cloud you would be going on.
Posted by fancypocket, 01-28-2011, 02:50 PM
boskone, cloud was using nearly 10GB RAM and dedicated is now using 8GB RAM.
Posted by Samuraid, 01-28-2011, 05:47 PM
For any given SAN, one can always build a machine with faster local storage. Mechanical, electrical, and optical physics simply work this way. Transferring data from source to target (or target to initiator) involves a shift of several different data mediums, be they SAS cables, a pci express bus, fiber, cat6, etc. Each step introduces at least some latency for which you cannot compensate. ---- As for the topic at hand: Linode is a traditional VPS provider, just with reasonably high-end hardware and with a useful automated management and provisioning system. It won't give you the same performance as a dedicated machine with similar specifications, however, it will come reasonably close.
Posted by cartika-andrew, 01-28-2011, 09:06 PM
Well certainly once storage is offloaded from the backplane, IO is not going to be as good as with local storage. Though, I guess it depends on how people are setup - we are seeing similar performance on the cloud to SATA local storage RAID10 and slightly better then SATA local storage RAID1. Of course SAS local storage is going to be the best with respect to IO Well of course, there is an overhead cost to everything. A cloud, at least how I define it is HA and elastic. meaning, if a node fails, you have other nodes serving your instance. If you need to scale beyound what is available on your existing node, your instance will be fired up on an alternate instance which has those resources available. Now, compare this to your dedicated server scenario. What happens if your server fails? you are down right? what happens if you get an unexpected large burst in traffic and need 24GB RAM for a few days? you are down until your provider upgrades your RAM right? and then what, you are going to remove it 4 days later again? this may work once, but, do this twice to your dedicated provider and they wont accommodate you again. Now try to make that dedicated server of yours HA. So, 2 servers right? load balancers right? and then either SAN shared storage (back where you started with IO issues), or complex and heavy synching scripts, etc.. 2 GB overhead you are seeing on the cloud is absolute peanuts. The best answer here is to use infrastructure intelligently. Use the cloud for web services, or mail services, or whatever. If you have really heavy IO requirements for your database services for example, get a couple of small, raid10 sas local storage VMs and do some replication on those and maybe some load balancing. Your total costs are likely right around the same price of that dedicated server of yours, and you have infinitely improved your quality of infrastructure. You have gained full HA and full elasticity across your services and you are running the proper services on the proper infrastructure.
Posted by fancypocket, 01-29-2011, 09:05 AM
Cartika, We have not tried your service yet (but it's on our list). So far, all cloud providers that we tried were not immune to downtime. Whenever they have issues with network, router, hardwares, etc they were still down. With dedicated servers, you will have to notify your customers/members of the scheduled maintenance when you are upgrading your machine. I would consider this as a one time down time. Customers/members will understand (In fact they are happier, because we are upgrading to better machine). In the end, that would be better than having a cloud which keeps having issue weekly either IO or setup, etc.
Posted by boskone, 01-29-2011, 09:08 AM
Why would you assume a cloud will have IO or setup issues? There are many 'definitions' and architectures of 'cloud' on the market already. When you shop around, ensure you check for the things you actually need or are important to you (like HA, uptime, good network, geographical location, high IO, etc). There are many providers selling 'cloud' machines that are basically just VPS, without much of the feature set a proper cloud can achieve.
Posted by fancypocket, 01-29-2011, 09:54 AM
boskone, We tried those real cloud providers. At least 6 of them. Frankly speaking, I have lost trust in cloud hosting.
Posted by boskone, 01-29-2011, 10:02 AM
Sounds like you tried some legacy or 'utility' style offerings, whereas your requirements are a bit more enterprise?
Posted by fancypocket, 01-29-2011, 10:32 AM
Can you tell me what is Enterprise Cloud?
Posted by boskone, 01-29-2011, 10:38 AM
We define enteprise cloud as latest generation, high performance servers <> with very high IO , high performance SAN arrays, and high performance networking. With the right architecture, you can deliver a cloud platform that exceeds the performance of all but the highest spec dedicated servers, and exceeds the resilience, high availability and scalability of any other solution, barring spending tens of thousands a month. Last edited by bear; 03-28-2011 at 07:44 AM.
Posted by cartika-andrew, 01-29-2011, 12:55 PM
Hello fancypocket - certainly there is no such thing as 100% uptime, but, a cloud instance should exhibit better uptime then a single dedicated server - especially over an extended period of time. Coupled with the benefits of elasticity, it really is an important technology moving forward. As I said previously though, use the right infrastructure for the right job. I have seen this as a big issue with both providers and customers. Everyone wants the magic solution - should I go cloud, vps or dedicated? etc, etc.. the answer unfortunately is not that simple, especially as sites and requirements grow. I think people would have better experiences on the whole if they chose the right infrastructure for the right job. Currently, heavy DB simply should not be run on the cloud - or at least on any cloud where storage is offloaded to SAN's, etc.. local storage VMs sold as "clouds" - sure, you can probably run heavy DBs on there. The issue is that none of these DB platforms (mysql, mssql, pgsql, oracle, etc, etc) run very well once storage is offloaded. Once DBs get too heavy, they need to be run on local storage systems, letting server backplanes handle the IO (and preferably in raid10 sas systems with 6-8 spindles. I think that if providers explained this very simple point to consumers, a lot of the angst around the cloud would disappear and people would start to realize the benefits it can deliver. This is the tragedy here and is the mess providers are creating for themselves without realizing it. I hope you will give this another shot at some point - host your web service on a cloud and your DB service on a GOOD local storage VM. Cheaper then the dedicated you have, and would be much more reliable and flexible.
Posted by eming, 01-29-2011, 01:06 PM
sure, that is ... sort of ... true. But in some cases it wouldn't be realistic/sensible for most of the WHT crowd. Like, some of our clients has deployed cloud offerings with the option of Fusion-IO to deal with pretty much any IO scenario. Sure, you could build machines with Fusion-IO in them, but it would cost you +$10k/card just to get started... In a cloud scenario you'd be able to buy access to that sort of IO performance on an hourly/daily basis with no capex in the process. We've also seen the first few clients that has deployed their clouds charging specifically for IO, I think that makes a lot of sense, and in the future that will be a 'currency' just like CPU/RAM/etc. D
Posted by cartika-andrew, 01-29-2011, 02:01 PM
Hi Ditlev, completely agree on both fronts. IO will certainly be included as standard as a "resource" at some point in the future. Re SAN's - the concept of building your own is a scary thing. There are simply so many unique challenges with these sorts of workloads - people simply do not know what they are getting themselves into. We chose to go the enterprise route with NetApp. Frankly they have seen these workloads and addressed these issues for a long long time. No need to re-invent the wheel and deal with the issues that will crop up and learn how to overcome them. Its not just NetApp obviously - equallogics, lefthand, etc, etc .. Having said this, some will choose to build out a server, use it as a SAN back ending a cloud - and when problems strike, the market perception becomes that cloud hosting is not ready yet.
Posted by layer0, 01-29-2011, 02:15 PM
The cloud was probably faster for sequential disk I/O but slower for random reads/writes. Random read/write performance is going to impact most web applications more than sequential.