91–100 of 196 posts
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To add to this: I find Digital Ocean's community/blog content impressive. In most instances I can google "Install X on Digital Ocean" and they have a solid, well updated walkthrough.
They've got pretty good bounty program for those who've got the knowledge, and are willing to write easy to understand tutorials. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/get-paid-to-write
To people wondering if this is a temporary thing, or what Digital Ocean's competitive advantage is (since someone else can come along with the same price point): It's that the web interface, and process for starting a "droplet", is dead-simple and super-elegant, their support docs are comprehensive and easy to use, and they even do things like let you manage your own DNS records. And it all just works. Digital Ocean…
I've been using DO for a few months. I recently set up an AWS instance to use as a proxy, as I wanted something cheap in East Asia temporarily, and AWS's Tokyo region fit the bill. Holy crap is AWS bizarre to set up. I got it done without too much trouble in the end, but man, the UI is just atrocious. It took way too long just to find the right place to go to get started with the process.
phpMyAdmin is great when you're first learning to work with the LAMP stack; it lets you fiddle with values, manually create databases, munge columns, etc.
But.
If there are multiple instances of your system running "in the wild" (even just within your own company), and their versions will ever have even the slightest chance of getting out-of-sync? You really want the entire change-history of your modifications to the database checked into git. You want to be able to take any previous sorta-known database state, and move it toward the current well-known database state. To do that, you need programmatic migrations.
And as soon as your software ships a "db/migrate" folder, (non-readonly) phpMyAdmin access becomes anathema to proper configuration management.
AWS can be thought of as a big database that contains your EC2 instances and snapshots, your S3 buckets, etc. At scale, you only want to interact with this database programmatically.
So: if this was the correct hypothesis for why the GUI sucks, what would be an expected prediction? That the programmatic APIs for manipulating AWS would be great.
And they are! All the HTTP APIs for AWS--the ones you would use in any automated provisioning script--are simple, clear, and pain-free. They're definitely the "first-class" road to AWS, documented to heck, and it's clear that Amazon itself dogfoods them directly.
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heaven help you if you manage to start an instance that has n permanent storage then reboot it. apparently that's the default, and you need to (imo) go out of your way to get permanent storage. I understand the use case for the former, but the UI and docs for the latter use case were, last I looked, pretty difficult to grok. Yeah, AWS has some functionality/scaling features that DO and Linode don't , but it's a small…
Its a bit deep to understand at first, but once you've been on the platform for a while, its pretty straightforward. I'm going to respectfully disagree with the "smaller set than people initially assume" -- there are huge differences. Some examples: * DNS can be set up to round robin * auto-scaling can be built in * load balancers are available and easy to use * For companies with multiple employees various levels of…
I'd think round robin DNS has nothing inherently to do with the infrastructure - that's a function of the DNS server, right?
Yes, there are some things AWS has that other services don't. My own experiences have been that people default to thinking AWS==cloud and that's the 'best' option, and this thinking was prevalent years ago, well before SES, SQS, RDS, etc were extra reasons for integration. They've got good services, but have done a hell of a branding job over the years as well.
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I've been using DO for a few months. I recently set up an AWS instance to use as a proxy, as I wanted something cheap in East Asia temporarily, and AWS's Tokyo region fit the bill. Holy crap is AWS bizarre to set up. I got it done without too much trouble in the end, but man, the UI is just atrocious. It took way too long just to find the right place to go to get started with the process.
I felt the same way for a while, but eventually, while working on a large cloud-based project, I had an epiphany: the GUI is basically the phpMyAdmin interface of AWS. phpMyAdmin is great when you're first learning to work with the LAMP stack; it lets you fiddle with values, manually create databases, munge columns, etc. But. If there are multiple instances of your system running "in the wild" (even just within your…
PRs welcome :)
To people wondering if this is a temporary thing, or what Digital Ocean's competitive advantage is (since someone else can come along with the same price point): It's that the web interface, and process for starting a "droplet", is dead-simple and super-elegant, their support docs are comprehensive and easy to use, and they even do things like let you manage your own DNS records. And it all just works. Digital Ocean…
Are there any good monitoring tools out there for letting you know if your droplet is having problems? I know DO has a REST api and you can obviously check stuff out via the DO web interface, but I am curious if there are any third party tools too?
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I felt the same way for a while, but eventually, while working on a large cloud-based project, I had an epiphany: the GUI is basically the phpMyAdmin interface of AWS. phpMyAdmin is great when you're first learning to work with the LAMP stack; it lets you fiddle with values, manually create databases, munge columns, etc. But. If there are multiple instances of your system running "in the wild" (even just within your…
I've never really used phpMyAdmin but I think I take your meaning. And I've always assumed that AWS made way more sense at large scale, since that's what it seems to be aimed at. So what you're saying makes a lot of sense.
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I share exactly the same feelings and experience with the person who replied to your comment previously. I have a server in each and I like them both. However; - Linode support is second to none. DO is not bad either but much slower and less responsive. You feel the difference when you really need it. - I had a CC payment issue with DO since the beginning. I mentioned it to the support twice but unsolved as of yet, u…
Why would you choose Linode for a serious/critical project ? Do you not know about their major security incidents ?
http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/30/iaas-provider-digitalocean...