Autoscaling for Digital Ocean? • Hacker News Board

Re: Autoscaling for Digital Ocean?

#41

Post by tobltobs » Fri, Apr 15, 2016, 2:32 PM UTC

tobltobs wrote: post #10

I do not believe that a price difference of 100% would be enough to make such a project interesting. Why not build something like this for dedicated boxes from hetzner, ovh ... I don't have a clue how much harder this would be, but a price difference of about 300% looks much more interesting.

Could those downvoters explain their downvotes please? He asked for an opinion.

Seriously, building a AWS clone on DO infrastructure is just not possible. Even if it would be it would actually be more expensive in the end as AWS for small to medium projects. If you using AWS you do not only pay for one virtual server, you are paying for a infrastructure. You would have to replicate parts of this infrastructure, which would require a few separate servers and you couldn't share those costs with other users.

Using DO instead of dedicated servers for this would be like building a Uber competitor using the Uber API.

Edited: I overlooked the fact that at least neither Hetzner nor OVH do provide a useful (for this project) way to order a dedicated server via the API. They do offer an Order API, but the spin up time is too long.

Re: Autoscaling for Digital Ocean?

#42

Post by kawera » Fri, Apr 15, 2016, 2:35 PM UTC

brudgers wrote: post #12

My 2 cents: Build an independent autoscaling tool that abstracts over the differences between clouds because: 1. Even if DigitalOcean is the best cloud provider today -- I'm not saying it is or isn't -- the probability it is the best that will ever be is approximately zero. The landscape changes. Heterogeneity among cloud providers is increasing and anyway latency will always be a function of the physical location of…

Yes, and libcloud is pretty good for abstracting providers: http://libcloud.apache.org/

Re: Autoscaling for Digital Ocean?

#43

Post by leemalmac » Fri, Apr 15, 2016, 2:37 PM UTC

tobltobs wrote: post #10

I do not believe that a price difference of 100% would be enough to make such a project interesting. Why not build something like this for dedicated boxes from hetzner, ovh ... I don't have a clue how much harder this would be, but a price difference of about 300% looks much more interesting.

Bare metal providers like Hetzner are different beasts. In my opinion, you use bare metal when your server load doesn't change much in time. It's too hard to scale fast with bare metal providers, because they need up to 2-3(not always) days to setup server. Virtual machines are managed more simply.

Re: Autoscaling for Digital Ocean?

#44

Post by gedrap » Fri, Apr 15, 2016, 3:01 PM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #34

gedrap wrote: post #11

Sounds like a fun project (and totally doable)! :) If I were you, I'd make heavy use of ansible, or something similar, for provisioning: 1) folks are familiar with it 2) could make it cross-platform more easily 3) well, no reinventing the wheel. For example, Ansible has ec2 module http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/ec2_module.html where you describe an instance and the number of them that should be running. So if you ha…

I've build setups like this with Ansible, but the more I use Ansible, the less likely it is that I'll consider it for future projects. I find it a lot less painful to write code to do these things directly than wrestle with Ansible. E.g. the amount of pain I went through before realising that the EC2 module at the time messed with whitespace in the user-data (great when you're transferring yaml... one more reason I d…

I guess it depends on the use case. If all you want to do is to make sure that, for example, all web servers have the same version of nginx, php and sync the configs of these services, I think ansible is a great tool and writing code to do that would definitely qualify as 'reinventing the wheel'.

I wouldn't disqualify the tool for a problem in one of the modules either. Bugs happen :)

Re: Autoscaling for Digital Ocean?

#45

Post by sytse » Fri, Apr 15, 2016, 4:11 PM UTC

We made GitLab Runner Autoscale https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ci-multi-runner/issues/... that can automatically spin up more droplets via Docker Machine to run your CI tests. We use it ourselves for GitLab builds (up to 100 machines) and enabled it for all GitLab.com users. For more information see the announcement https://about.gitlab.com/2016/03/29/gitlab-runner-1-1-releas... Feel free to ask questions.