StopNGoGrid
I’ve been working a lot with GoGrid lately as we needed some west coast servers and Amazon doesn’t offer US-west yet. Maybe I’ve just been spoiled by Amazons offering but I’ve found GoGrid to be almost unusable for day to day work. A few of the issues so far.
1. OS images – They only offer centos/RHEL for the linux side which I am not comfortable with plus I hate yum so I end up spending large amounts of time fighting the system to configure new servers
2. Load balancer – You get a free load balancer which is awesome! What they don’t tell you is that they are not configurable. Add a new server to your cluster? You need to delete the load balancer and recreate it which of course means downtime. Like 10-15 minutes of downtime everytime you want to add a new server. Thats just not acceptable. Even support can’t change this for you when you call up.
3. No stored images – If you customize your servers quite heavily you will be heartbroken to find out that you cant store that image to use on new servers. No instead on your next server you’ll have to do it all again so write it down.
4. no upgradeability – If you start with say 1 or 2gig servers and realize after a while that you need to upgrade them you can’t. I spoke to support about this as well and was told to create a new server and delete the old one. Thats fine if you can use the default image but I can’t so that means 1-2 hours wasted for each server I have to change plus see issue 2 I’ll have to have 10-15 minutes of downtime when I replace the load balancer.
I’ve been working a lot of cloud environments lately including 20 boxes on Amazon EC2, and 4 on GoGrid. I’m looking at Mosso this week. Once done I’ll post a round up of them all.
April 22nd, 2009 at 3:45 am
Why do you need them on the west coast?
April 22nd, 2009 at 3:46 am
Hi Shawn,
I’m really sorry that GoGrid to you appears to be unusable for day to day work. While words are little consolation, I do want to briefly touch upon each of the 4 points you outlined.
1) OS images – yes, currently we only offer RHEL & CentOS (as well as Windows Server 2003/2008 if you are a Windows person). But soon we will have Ubuntu added to the mix. What Linux distro are you looking for specifically?
2) Load Balancers – you are correct. The current version of our hardware-based load balancers currently does not have edit capabilities enabled within the GUI or API. However, this is an item that will be address this year. I don’t know the exact timing unfortunately. Also, there are ways to create and delete the LB’s at the same time. It’s a bit of a hack (using two windows of a browser) and I’m not sure how long it takes an IP to become released back once you delete the LB, but it really shouldn’t be 10-15 minutes.
3. Stored Images – I guess you didn’t read your April GoGrid newsletter (grin). We do mention a new feature that is coming in June called myGSIs. I’m in the process of finishing a blog post all about it. It will be posted here: http://blog.gogrid.com and I know you will be pleasantly surprised.
4. Changing RAM – that two is something nice that is part of the myGSI feature being rolled out. It is often requested and we have a solution that we think you will like.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me. I’m @hightechdad (on Twitter) and you can email me: michael AT gogrid.com.
Look forward to your review.
-Michael
April 22nd, 2009 at 4:00 am
Issue #3: use puppet/cfengine/chef to configure your system. Nobody does this by hand any more..
April 22nd, 2009 at 4:13 am
Gary,
Cheers for the info. I’ll have a look into them, I’ve heard of puppet before but not the others do you have any preference?
April 22nd, 2009 at 4:13 am
We need to keep network latency very low for our applications so we try to place servers as close to our clients as we can.
April 22nd, 2009 at 4:19 am
@Shawn & @Gary We have used and tested Puppet/Chef on GoGrid as well to some extent. It is a good config aid.
-M