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DigitalOcean introduces Load Balancers
- zalmoxes 10y agoI don't know if DO plans to provide a managed Kubernetes offering similar to GKE, but if they did I would use it. having a Load Balancer is necessary to integrate with k8s similarly to GCLB and aws, so this is a step in the right direction.
- raiyu 10y agoWe've been using Kubernetes internally for quite some time and replacing a few of our older and more difficult to manage systems with it. We are looking into productionizing kubernetes so that our customers can also use kubernetes if they like and making that experience seamless. It's something that we are actively working on in 2017 but it's still too early to give much more guidance. But certainly if you wanted to go through the process of setting up your own kubernetes cluser on DO you could do so. =]
- eicnix 10y agoI have some question about your loadbalancer and your plans about kube on DO: - Does your loadbalancer support HTTP/2 yet? - Can you share your scripts for setting up a HA kube cluster on DO? - Do you plan to provide a kubernetes cloud provider for DO? Having a DO cloud provider and standard scripts would probably help the adoption of kube on DO. Without a cloud provider I can't many benefits compared to traditional bare metal providers which are still cheaper.
- raiyu 10y agoOur goal would be to provide a complete product solution so you would just be able to login and create a cluster. Unfortunately our current implementation that we are running behind the scenes wouldn't be directly portable to our end customers and we wouldn't want users to go through the hassle of running scripts to spin up their cluster. we are hosting a meetup tomorrow in our NYC HQ but we also stream remotely if you are interesting in hearing more from our of engineering managers and you can ask him questions directly =] https://www.meetup.com/DigitalOceanNYC/events/237418043/ https://www.meetup.com/DigitalOceanNYC/events/237418043/
- Eridrus 10y agoI don't know what your load balancer architecture is, but It's disappointing that using a load balancer has to cost $20/month, which is fine when you need it, but drastically increases your costs when you don't. It would be really nice to see someone offer a solution that can actually scale from a single node to multiple nodes as necessary. Being able to run my application on the load balancer inside a container would be pretty nice.
- xfiler 10y agoKontena (https://www.kontena.io https://www.kontena.io) has pretty nice integration to DO.
- eicnix 10y agoGCP also provides globally distributed load balancers which reduces the overhead to deploy is multiple regions.
- simplehuman 10y agoI am curious to hear what people use digital ocean for. It's great for running one-off servers and to run WordPress, ghost, lamp stack. But I can hardly imagine people using load balancers like in AWS. Does anyone have a usecase? Thanks.
- nsxwolf 10y agoIf your DigitalOcean application suddenly became more popular and was performing poorly under load, why wouldn't you use this option? It would be a lot of work to move everything over to AWS.
- simplehuman 10y agoLoad balancer is not a magic bullet. It only expands the compute. Your DB, static pages, storage are all bottlenecks. Don't get me wrong, I am just wondering if digital ocean wants to be AWS.
- wwalser 10y ago> Load balancer is not a magic bullet. It only expands the compute. Your DB, static pages, storage are all bottlenecks. I think we can make the generous assumption that you've profiled and decided that compute is the problem and not static pages or DB. If that were the case, why would you not use DO load balancing? > I am just wondering if digital ocean wants to be AWS. No, they want to be better than AWS. They absolutely want that AWS $$$. Selling to devs who create "MVPs" and prototypes might pay the bills for now but if they are going to grow into their valuation they need larger clients. Seems likely that large clients wanted load balancing.
- mkagenius 10y ago> AWS For me somehow, the load balancer nevers puts a server back again in rotation even though ssh and http directly access works. Need to boot up the ec2 and then it comes back in rotation.
- johnnycarcin 10y ago
- SparkyMcUnicorn 10y agoLinode's load balancers have clearly defined support for 10,000 concurrent connections. Am I missing where the limits are on DO's?
- welder 10y agoNo, you are not alone. I can't find any performance, tech specs, concurrent connection limits, etc about DO load balancers.
- bogomipz 10y agoI was under the impression that Digital Ocean was mostly lower end i.e the $5.00 or $10.00 a month instances. Can someone say what is the use case for a load balancer in front of small instances? Is Digital Ocean now targeting larger customers now?
- freehunter 10y agoThe biggest advantage even for low-end services would be high-availability. If one server goes down you can automatically fail over to another without having to build that into your code.
- bogomipz 10y agoDoes someone running a wordpress site need HA though? You could also just buy a pingdom account and be notified when there is a problem and resolve it via support as needed. Adding an LB tier is adding a layer of complexity and different failure modes. That's why I was asking if maybe they were targeting larger customers now.
- freehunter 10y agoI think you're a little off on the idea that DO only hosts unimportant Wordpress sites, or that Wordpress could never be used for something that needs high availability. As of 2014 Digital Ocean was the third largest hosting provider, so they're not a mom-and-pop operation.
- bogomipz 10y agoI never said or implied that the company was a mom-and-pop operation. I know they are a large company. Being the 3rd largest hosting provider however doesn't say anything about what type and size of customers they have. Who are some the larger customers that run their businesses on D.O infra?
- Tassels 10y ago
- tachion 10y ago"No ops needed". Every time I see such piece of PR I cry a little inside. Sure, spread such things even more, so that everyone around, devs, managers, business take it even more seriously and build more horrible, unsustainable, overpriced, insecure and failing infrastructures and services. No ops needed in the serverless lambda cloud! ;)
- stephenr 10y agoIm not sure if I want to hug you or sit in the corner with you and cry.
- canes123456 10y agoThe type of companies that create horrible, unsustainable, overpriced, insecure and failing infrastructures and services using cloud systems will create even worse systems with an in house ops team.
- stephenr 10y agoI don't follow your logic. You're suggesting that because a company without any experienced Ops staff makes bad decisions about their Infra, if the same company had experienced Ops staff, those staff would somehow make even worse decisions about their Infra?
- dasil003 10y agoThe GPs logic is that your company either has experienced ops folks or it doesn't, and it will create shitty systems whether cloud-based or traditional if the case is the latter.
- canes123456 10y agoWhat dasil003 said. The type of company making terrible choices with a cloud provider will not hire and empower a good Ops team. If the company doesn't hire a couple of experienced Ops people to manage their could infrastructure, why do you think they will do a good job hiring a team? You can shoot your self in the foot with any gun. However, one path requires many more choices, more people, and more process to get it right. If they can't get the simpler path right, than what makes you think they will be able to go down the more complex path? For my experience, the average company with on premises servers with a Ops staff is horrible, unsustainable, overpriced, insecure and failing.
- iDemonix 10y agoI was looking forward to this, but the price point is too high, I could run VMs that use keepalive or similar for cheaper.
- wwalser 10y agoFor failure recovery on a single compute that'll work but doesn't that story get more complex as you add more compute VMs? You know, the actual… ah… balancing of load?
- bogomipz 10y agoWell I could just add two compute nodes running IPVS and keepalived and get the same thing no? I think that was the OPs point. It seems like that might be far cheaper that this offering.
- wwalser 10y agoI get it and I think for failover it doesn't make sense to use this feature. If you want one feature of load balancing, sure, roll that yourself. What happens as you want each additional feature, incrementally getting closer to rolling your own load balancing instead of just flipping a switch to enable it for $20/month? My point was just that the complexity goes up as you want more. At some point, it's worth the money to just use someone else's solution to all of those small problems instead of maintaining your own worse version. Most small teams likely shouldn't be writing their own nginx, haproxy and keepalive configuration for load balancing. The $20-$200/month that it'll cost them is well worth the time that their engineers back. Of course, there does exist another tier of scale where it becomes questionable to continue paying the premium that comes from asking others to solve your infra problems for you. This falls into the "problems we'd love to be lucky enough to have" bucket for most companies.
- chrissnell 10y agoDoes anybody know what they're powering this service with? I presume that it's software-based: nginx, haproxy, traefik, or similar.
- lykron 10y agoDigitalOcean seems to be going after Linode. Will be interesting to see how Linode responds.
- IFeelOK 10y agoIs Valentine's day the day for cloud hosting product unveiling? Linode has announced some new plans and an upgrade to one of their existing ones (plus verifying betas for a new Linode Manager, RESTful API and block storage service in the coming months). https://blog.linode.com/2017/02/14/high-memory-instances-and-5-linodes/ https://blog.linode.com/2017/02/14/high-memory-instances-and...
- adam1210 10y agohttps://blog.linode.com/2017/02/14/high-memory-instances-and-5-linodes/ https://blog.linode.com/2017/02/14/high-memory-instances-and...
- CrLf 10y agoLoad balancers is nice, but per-client private networking would be better. Just a thought.
- bogomipz 10y agoCan you elaborate on your comment? Do D.O. instances all share the same vlan?
- nik736 10y agoYes, they do.
- bogomipz 10y agoWhat?! Is that made public anywhere? I have not heard that before. Why don't they have an overlay? I would think this is a non-starter for many(most?) businesses.
- cakeface 10y agoI think it's pretty clearly explained in DigitalOcean's docs. They have a public interface and a private interface. The private interface is not Internet routable but is routable by all other instances in the datacenter. I agree that it is a non-starter for me, but it's definitely public.
- nissehulth 10y agoOlder thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9152581 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9152581
- raiyu 10y agoThat's currently in development for 2017, it's towards the end of this year. As we make more progress that timeline will get tightened up. But it is something we are actively working on and it was kicked off in the tail end of 2016.
- 10y ago
- borplk 10y agoSince the topic is relevant, I was disappointed with how basic Amazon ELB is. Many features such as weighted or IP-based routing are missing. I know it's possible to achieve that with other options like Route53 or running your own load balancers behind ELB but for my basic needs and projects that's too much cost and complexity. I just want a "load balancer as a service" that has a decent feature-set.
- nailer 10y agoDigitalOcean peeps: a lot of cloud provider load balancers (specifically: AWS ELBs and Heroku's various HTTPS products) are currently really slow due to: - No ECC cert support (slowing down initial connection time) - No HTTP/2 (so no multiplexing, and text based protocol, slowing down fetching the actual page) Do DO Load Balancers support these?
- kinghajj 10y agoThe new application ELB supports HTTP2. One can confirm by looking at the Chrome developer tools. http://imgur.com/4mpDwJh http://imgur.com/4mpDwJh
- fooey 10y agowe actually had the new load balancers break an app when they added h2 support there was some legacy code expecting headers to be all caps and amazon rewrites them to all lower case when they pass through the traffic that was a fun one to figure out
- nailer 10y ago> The new application ELB supports HTTP2. Do you mean the new DO LBs or something else? The DO LBs are not referred to as 'elastic' / ELBs. I've just set up a DO LB and it's HTTP 1.1 all the way. Edit: have confirmed with Digital Ocean: no HTTP/2 support (there's HTTP/2 passthrough, but you can't terminate there). They do support ECC certs though.
- kinghajj 10y agoNo, I meant ELB, as in AWS.
- plainOldText 10y agoCould someone more knowledgeable please provide some insight into why using their load balancers would be preferred over, say having regular Droplet instances act as load balancers, by leveraging nginx for instance?
- eicnix 10y agoSingle droplets are a single point of failure and have a limited availability. You can take actions to mitigate this SPOF like running multiple droplets and distributing requests by adding all of these droplets to your DNS configuration also known as DNS round robin. Another solution is too pay Digital Ocean to provide network endpoints that are more available and allow you to provide a higher availability for your application. Because DO works on different level of abstraction they have more possibilities to provide this availability.
- rebase 10y agoBandwidth Bandwidth Bandwidth.
- unethical_ban 10y agoeicnix says here "Droplets are a single-point-of-failure". I don't see any direct explanation as to how these LBs aren't. It's limited to a single region for backend droplets, and who knows how fragile they are. Putting up a droplet with caddy/nginx/apache and acting like a reverse proxy, depending on your usecase, could be 75% cheaper than this solution offered.
- Tassels 10y agoBut, if that Droplet goes down, so does the reverse proxy. You'd need at least two Droplets to ensure no SPOF.
- nik736 10y agoHow much concurrent visitors does it support?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- activatedgeek 10y agoIt is very interesting to see how DO is expanding its portfolio slowly and steadily. Does anybody have a relatively large-scale (>50k users) mildly mission-critical applications running on DO? Can you share you experience with existing services?
- fillskills 10y agoWe have a 50K+ users/month running on DO. But I think you meant 50k/day. Anyways, no real issues so far. Excellent service to boot. Edit - we might actually be using the load balancer pretty soon as we prepare to scale.
- activatedgeek 10y agoWell, I guess still a fair number. Good to hear it has been working out well.
- hexhex 10y agoWe have such an application running on DO, 100k visitors users a month. We have a big application server running and other servers for DB (postgres and redis) and static files (which is basically a nginx mirror). So far, we are satisfied. Over the last year, there were 4 out times which lasted 30min to 1h caused by DO, which is alright I guess. Since we experience more traffic peaks in the last time, we may use their load balancers in the future. The application servers are not the problem though, more the DB server. This is more a pain, since setting up and maintaining a DB cluster is quite a lot of work. We might go to AWS for this. TL;DR DO works for larger projects, databases are bit of a pain though
- activatedgeek 10y agoI think the DO Load Balancers won't help with your DB operational concern. You'll have to use some other in-house or outsourced solution. If you switch to AWS, will you be maintaining a cross-datacenter VPN connection or something?
- tryrobbo 10y agoHuh, I'm impressed DO have managed this long without them. I can see a lot of use cases for this, especially in the failover use case.
- autotune 10y agoCurious how these handle high traffic. If no pre-warming is needed and it can handle higher traffic spikes, I can see this being a potential alternative to AWS ELB.
- baccredited 10y agoNo ipv6?
- novaleaf 10y agoI don't know if it's a lot harder, but it seems the usefulness of this is severely diminished without the ability to autoscale your backend.
- owenwil 10y agoHonestly, this is awesome. It looks a lot easier than AMazon's EC2 load balancer to use, and fits right into their whole philosophy.
- rc_bhg 10y agoAnd linode introduces high memory instances. Today is a good day for all of us!
- solibra 10y agoNo mention of HTTP/2 and Websockets support though.
- AYBABTME 10y agoIf you set it to TCP instead of HTTP/HTTPS, HTTP/2 and websockets will work.
- cma 10y agoDoes anyone know why egress bandwidth on Google's cloud is so expensive compared to Digital Ocean?
- ak2196 10y agoCongratulations guys! Welcome to 1995.
- edpichler 10y agoI like Digital Ocean solutions, but I am currently using Nginx under a Digital Ocean Droplet, for USD 5 month, and it's working very well.