DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding • Hacker News Board

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#31

Post by gog » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:10 PM UTC

brianwawok wrote: post #20

vruiz wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have they implemented IP failover already? I haven't heard anything. Having your own LB without being able to fail over the IP is not HA. If the LB does down so does your business.

What? You use DNS failover and multiple load balancers. FOO.COM A record -> 1.2.3.4, 1.2.3.5, 1.2.3.6 Then at 1.2.3.4, 1.2.3.5, and 1.2.3.6 you put a load balancer that splits loads between all of your clients. Any LB goes down, and DNS client retries will deal with it. If any backend server goes down, your LB will deal with it. Using this pretty successfully at digital ocean right now. What is the downside? I guess…

That is not how things work. Once your system resolves the DNS record it will keep using that record for a while (depending on the TTL of the record and other factors).

Your browser will also cache the result of the DNS lookup, and if that server goes down it will not try to do another DNS lookup for another host and your service will be unavailable.

It will also be unavailable for any new customer that gets the "faulty" IP address.

Specifying multiple DNS records will just cause your DNS server to use one of those, usually in a round robin fashion.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#32

Post by seiji » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:12 PM UTC

samhoggnz wrote: post #30

seiji wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the simplicity is great. AWS has 80 products and it takes months to figure how how they all work together. DO's click-n-go for $5 month helps just from a mental clarity point of view. At this point AWS is so complicated they should be offering an official Cisco-like series of certifications.

I'm not sure they're at the level of Cisco, but they do have certifications. http://aws.amazon.com/certification/

Oh, great to know. They are really cheap too ($150, $300, $75 re-up).

Amusingly, that page demonstrates the need for an AWS certification in the first place: the page has over 100 things trying to grab your attention with no focus or clear direction at all. Amazon as a corporate entity seems to go for "maximum information + maximum confusion" in their UX at every turn.

Always worth a re-read: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#33

Post by tobz » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:16 PM UTC

vruiz wrote: post #27

brianwawok wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? You use DNS failover and multiple load balancers. FOO.COM A record -> 1.2.3.4, 1.2.3.5, 1.2.3.6 Then at 1.2.3.4, 1.2.3.5, and 1.2.3.6 you put a load balancer that splits loads between all of your clients. Any LB goes down, and DNS client retries will deal with it. If any backend server goes down, your LB will deal with it. Using this pretty successfully at digital ocean right now. What is the downside? I guess…

> Any LB goes down, and DNS client retries will deal with it. How? How does the DNS client know that the IP no longer works? do browsers today have this mechanism? I'm not a network guy so perhaps I'm wrong but it's my understanding the problem with DNS load balancing is that you can not invalidate the TTL on the client.

Your view is an accurate view. It takes the end user -- be it some sort of client, browser, or manual user retry -- to hit the other, alive IP(s). There's also the TTL of a bad record being dropped to consider.

You can simulate IP failover with something like Elastic Network Interfaces / Elastic IPs in AWS... it's just not going to be on the same level of speed as doing it in, say, your own rack in a datacenter. It's also subject to weirdness where you could have some sort of split brain, nodes trying to take over interfaces in a loop. The health checked "multiple load balancers behind a single DNS record" approach has flaws but also simplifies a lot of things.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#34

Post by curiousjorge » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:17 PM UTC

it's pretty amazin what they've managed to do, what was essentially an over saturated market, they've managed to pull ahead of incumbents like linode.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#35

Post by neom » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:20 PM UTC

gshakir wrote: post #13

If all goes well, looks like they might be competing directly with AWS soon.

AWS is basically software defined enterprise/software defined business at this point. Their products and services are amazing, and they will certainly dominate the fortune with GOOG and M$, etc. I'd imagine the push down into the SMB will more a bit more difficult, the push up into the SMB with a more b2c(dev) product offering and community approach seems to be the the better game here, think Microsoft and Apple in the early days. These are still multi-billion dollar addressable markets, there is a lot of room to play in cloud.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#36

Post by Killswitch » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:26 PM UTC

Great work Ben and team! I've been a customer for 2 years now, absolutely love the service and see no reason to leave it.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#37

Post by brianwawok » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:36 PM UTC

vruiz wrote: post #27

brianwawok wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? You use DNS failover and multiple load balancers. FOO.COM A record -> 1.2.3.4, 1.2.3.5, 1.2.3.6 Then at 1.2.3.4, 1.2.3.5, and 1.2.3.6 you put a load balancer that splits loads between all of your clients. Any LB goes down, and DNS client retries will deal with it. If any backend server goes down, your LB will deal with it. Using this pretty successfully at digital ocean right now. What is the downside? I guess…

> Any LB goes down, and DNS client retries will deal with it. How? How does the DNS client know that the IP no longer works? do browsers today have this mechanism? I'm not a network guy so perhaps I'm wrong but it's my understanding the problem with DNS load balancing is that you can not invalidate the TTL on the client.

It is up to the client. But all of the clients (browsers) out there do more or less the same thing.. they try the first DNS record.. if no response in ~30 seconds, try the second, and so on - going down the list.

TTL does not matter here because I am not yanking or adding to my DNS record. I am simply saying "Here are 3 servers.. try them in order until you find one that works".

In practice, a helpful feature is

a) Most clients try them in order from top to bottom b) Most DNS servers (including Digital Oceans) randomize the return order.

So if you do 2 dns requests, the first will return 1.2.3.4, 1.2.3.5, 1.2.3.6, and the second will return 1.2.3.5, 1.2.3.6, 1.2.3.4

This has the double benefit of splitting traffic more or less evenly between my load balancers, and dealing with things with one or more is dead.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#38

Post by brianwawok » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:37 PM UTC

gog wrote: post #31

brianwawok wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? You use DNS failover and multiple load balancers. FOO.COM A record -> 1.2.3.4, 1.2.3.5, 1.2.3.6 Then at 1.2.3.4, 1.2.3.5, and 1.2.3.6 you put a load balancer that splits loads between all of your clients. Any LB goes down, and DNS client retries will deal with it. If any backend server goes down, your LB will deal with it. Using this pretty successfully at digital ocean right now. What is the downside? I guess…

That is not how things work. Once your system resolves the DNS record it will keep using that record for a while (depending on the TTL of the record and other factors). Your browser will also cache the result of the DNS lookup, and if that server goes down it will not try to do another DNS lookup for another host and your service will be unavailable. It will also be unavailable for any new customer that gets the "fau…

TTL does not matter because I am not adding or removing systems from my DNS record. Even during an outage, a request to my domain name will return both the broken and the working load balancers.

I am simply giving a list of servers that can answer a request.. clients know to keep trying till one works. (Which they all do. Try it!)

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#39

Post by brianwawok » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:41 PM UTC

CoachRufus87 wrote: post #25

brianwawok wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think HA is really on the needed list, seeing as you can roll your own load balancer in 5 minutes using provided tutorials. I mean I guess they could make an image for it to make it a little easier.. The AWS elastic load balancer is really nothing fancy. Real private networking and object shared storage are both huge for sure though.

How is their current private networking offering not 'real'?

Any other digital ocean server in the same datacenter can hit your private IP.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#40

Post by duggan » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:45 PM UTC

jdoss wrote: post #4

buckbova wrote: post #3

I've got two droplets now, one for email/owncloud and another for personal projects with automated backups. It's pretty easy to use, but I worry I don't have the sysadmin chops to keep it secure. Edit: I followed tutorials on auto-updating packages through cron, securing ssh, and setting up ufw for only services needed when I set it up. It's been about 2 years now so maybe I shouldn't worry.

Honest question. How much would you pay to have something that manages the updates and setup for you and give you the sysadmin help when you need it?

Judging by the general implosion of the PaaS industry, not enough to make it worthwhile.

It's a much more complex problem than most people think.