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I 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

I 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 ago
If 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 ago
  Load 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
The apps you listed (+ other similar apps) are exactly what I use DO for. To me they are the KISS cloud provider. Nothing super fancy but the flip side to that is that they are easy to use and interface with. When I want an MVP or a non-enterprise type app I go to DO. If I want something more complex or something that needs more PaaS-like services (databases, app hosting, etc) I turn to the big three. EDIT: This is coming from someone who works at MSFT and gets a bit of Azure for free. To me it's all about using the right tool for the job.
- ohstopitu 10y ago
  Azure's VMs was awesome till they decided to create the new portal and add in new features. Then they made networking insanely complicated. But Azure is very pricy if you want to use it just for VMs.
meister 10y ago
DO is cheap, you can achieve scaling and failover for a lower fee than with AWS. Their new load balancing solution is nice but lacks features and its price is 3x higher than what we provide at https://pikacloud.com https://pikacloud.com.
- _wmd 10y ago
  This is a short term illusion, with instance reservations and the wider variety of storage options available, AWS can work out cheaper even for small accounts. Source: spent a several days in December cost modelling a few services for a client, was surprised by the result
  - disiplus 10y ago
    you can run this yourself with ngnix but if you have everything inside DO then the ability to easily add new droplets is great. create droplets on demand from snapshots, add them to load balance and you are ready.
  - sidlls 10y ago
    I have been under the impression that structuring a system to use AWS with portability in mind ends up costing as much or more than optimizing the structure for AWS such that one is effectively locked-in at scale. That's a trade-off that has to be factored in to a decision. I mean granted I've only done rough guesstimates for some toy applications for myself and some friends and family, so I could be totally off base here.
- corobo 10y ago
  > Pay as you use. Hourly rate, monthly billing. Nah. I pay monthly, include monthly pricing. I can probably set up an nginx/varnish instance faster than I can calculate the monthly cost when you're billing by the hour.
  - falcolas 10y ago
    You aren't the audience, then. These offerings are for people who don't want to manage an nginx/varnish stack. One thing that is nice is the automatic failover (of the routing stack) when a VM or datacenter goes down.
wwalser 10y ago
Um… production environments? Early on you probably don't need it for the load but for handling recovery if an application server goes down. Prior to now if you wanted to run a passable production environment for a small application you'd probably do something like a single persistent store behind 2 application servers fronted by an nginx to balance load across the two. Doing that requires nginx config and finding an off the shelf package for handling healthchecks and automated removal of failed items from the nginx load balance rotation. Now DO will do that for you at slightly above the cost of you rolling it yourself but with the benefit of being (probably) more reliable and requiring near-zero time investment. Edit: Other threads have pointed out that keepalive on the VM works for recovery on single compute instances. Seems likely that this is for DO's larger client who need recovery and multiple computes with load balanced across said compute surface.
- simplehuman 10y ago
  So, I am not talking about the load balancer feature itself. I understand what it does. My question is if any of DO users want this today? If so, I am interested in knowing their use case (what kind of app requires a load balancer and nothing else). I don't want some imaginative work load, I want to a real example. For example, I cannot use it for my wp installs because the db does not scale without some work.
  - drinchev 10y ago
    I'm using it for failover setup ( 2 x db + 2 x app + 1 x lb ) for small traffic app. For the LB I use haproxy server only, which has it's own healthcheck.
  - neom 10y ago
    We use it for all our front-end infrastructure, AWS for all our backend infrastructure, the front-end devs prefer DO and can consume an API created by back end devs on AWS.
    - eicnix 10y ago
      Can you talk about the additional latency between your front-page and backend by running in different cloud environments? How do you deal with a availability zone failure of a cloud provider?
gtf21 10y ago
We run our entire stack on DO - a couple of machines each with a small cluster of containers and a load balancer, plus a VPN server, database servers, rabbitmq server, etc.. I find it a very painless way to do things.
vidarh 10y ago
Depending on your workloads, DO servers can come out cheaper or more expensive than AWS, but bandwidth at DO is so much cheaper than AWS that for bandwidth intensive stuff I can't serve entirely out of Europe (where Hetzner is vastly cheaper than DO again), DO is often a much cheaper alternative. Sometimes we use it as a cost-cutting do-it-yourself CDN in front of AWS for clients that insist on S3 for storage (and again where we can't just cache everything in Europe for latency reasons). For bandwidth heavy applications, you can pay for significant numbers of Droplets from the AWS bandwidth savings alone. Lack of load balancers have meant resorting to DNS based failover and hoping clients handle short TTLs (it works reasonably well, but with occasional issues), but the cost reductions are sufficient to make that a worthwhile tradeoff for many clients.
cs02rm0 10y ago
In a word; redundancy.
bdcravens 10y ago
Services like Cloud66 let you target many different cloud providers, so the complexity of apps you deploy doesn't need to be any different on DO than AWS. When you attach a load balancer, in AWS, it uses ELB; in DO it spins up an HAProxy instance. There are likely advantages to having parity between the stacks, having the load balancer higher in the stack.
chrisper 10y ago
I just run my VPN server there since they charge by hour. So I create my VPN on DO whenever I need it and destroy it automatically after a while. But for everything else I have a dedicated server at Hetzner.
lloeki 10y ago
We're building a specialized Rails web app that gets deployed, customized and possibly extended (via additional engines) per tenant. Having a single VM per customer is just so KISS, simplifying every step of the process, billing, security, data isolation, load management... Any other solution would become ludicrously complex in comparison, for no reason at all, buzzwords be damned.
- manigandham 10y ago
  What does this have to do with DO specifically? Any cloud provider can give you as many VMs as you want.

nsxwolf 10y ago

If 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 ago
Load 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

The apps you listed (+ other similar apps) are exactly what I use DO for. To me they are the KISS cloud provider. Nothing super fancy but the flip side to that is that they are easy to use and interface with. When I want an MVP or a non-enterprise type app I go to DO. If I want something more complex or something that needs more PaaS-like services (databases, app hosting, etc) I turn to the big three. EDIT: This is coming from someone who works at MSFT and gets a bit of Azure for free. To me it's all about using the right tool for the job.

ohstopitu 10y ago
Azure's VMs was awesome till they decided to create the new portal and add in new features. Then they made networking insanely complicated. But Azure is very pricy if you want to use it just for VMs.

meister 10y ago

DO is cheap, you can achieve scaling and failover for a lower fee than with AWS. Their new load balancing solution is nice but lacks features and its price is 3x higher than what we provide at https://pikacloud.com https://pikacloud.com.

_wmd 10y ago
This is a short term illusion, with instance reservations and the wider variety of storage options available, AWS can work out cheaper even for small accounts. Source: spent a several days in December cost modelling a few services for a client, was surprised by the result
- disiplus 10y ago
  you can run this yourself with ngnix but if you have everything inside DO then the ability to easily add new droplets is great. create droplets on demand from snapshots, add them to load balance and you are ready.
- sidlls 10y ago
  I have been under the impression that structuring a system to use AWS with portability in mind ends up costing as much or more than optimizing the structure for AWS such that one is effectively locked-in at scale. That's a trade-off that has to be factored in to a decision. I mean granted I've only done rough guesstimates for some toy applications for myself and some friends and family, so I could be totally off base here.
corobo 10y ago
> Pay as you use. Hourly rate, monthly billing. Nah. I pay monthly, include monthly pricing. I can probably set up an nginx/varnish instance faster than I can calculate the monthly cost when you're billing by the hour.
- falcolas 10y ago
  You aren't the audience, then. These offerings are for people who don't want to manage an nginx/varnish stack. One thing that is nice is the automatic failover (of the routing stack) when a VM or datacenter goes down.

wwalser 10y ago

Um… production environments? Early on you probably don't need it for the load but for handling recovery if an application server goes down. Prior to now if you wanted to run a passable production environment for a small application you'd probably do something like a single persistent store behind 2 application servers fronted by an nginx to balance load across the two. Doing that requires nginx config and finding an off the shelf package for handling healthchecks and automated removal of failed items from the nginx load balance rotation. Now DO will do that for you at slightly above the cost of you rolling it yourself but with the benefit of being (probably) more reliable and requiring near-zero time investment. Edit: Other threads have pointed out that keepalive on the VM works for recovery on single compute instances. Seems likely that this is for DO's larger client who need recovery and multiple computes with load balanced across said compute surface.

simplehuman 10y ago
So, I am not talking about the load balancer feature itself. I understand what it does. My question is if any of DO users want this today? If so, I am interested in knowing their use case (what kind of app requires a load balancer and nothing else). I don't want some imaginative work load, I want to a real example. For example, I cannot use it for my wp installs because the db does not scale without some work.
- drinchev 10y ago
  I'm using it for failover setup ( 2 x db + 2 x app + 1 x lb ) for small traffic app. For the LB I use haproxy server only, which has it's own healthcheck.
- neom 10y ago
  We use it for all our front-end infrastructure, AWS for all our backend infrastructure, the front-end devs prefer DO and can consume an API created by back end devs on AWS.
  - eicnix 10y ago
    Can you talk about the additional latency between your front-page and backend by running in different cloud environments? How do you deal with a availability zone failure of a cloud provider?

gtf21 10y ago

We run our entire stack on DO - a couple of machines each with a small cluster of containers and a load balancer, plus a VPN server, database servers, rabbitmq server, etc.. I find it a very painless way to do things.

vidarh 10y ago

Depending on your workloads, DO servers can come out cheaper or more expensive than AWS, but bandwidth at DO is so much cheaper than AWS that for bandwidth intensive stuff I can't serve entirely out of Europe (where Hetzner is vastly cheaper than DO again), DO is often a much cheaper alternative. Sometimes we use it as a cost-cutting do-it-yourself CDN in front of AWS for clients that insist on S3 for storage (and again where we can't just cache everything in Europe for latency reasons). For bandwidth heavy applications, you can pay for significant numbers of Droplets from the AWS bandwidth savings alone. Lack of load balancers have meant resorting to DNS based failover and hoping clients handle short TTLs (it works reasonably well, but with occasional issues), but the cost reductions are sufficient to make that a worthwhile tradeoff for many clients.

cs02rm0 10y ago

In a word; redundancy.

bdcravens 10y ago

Services like Cloud66 let you target many different cloud providers, so the complexity of apps you deploy doesn't need to be any different on DO than AWS. When you attach a load balancer, in AWS, it uses ELB; in DO it spins up an HAProxy instance. There are likely advantages to having parity between the stacks, having the load balancer higher in the stack.

chrisper 10y ago

I just run my VPN server there since they charge by hour. So I create my VPN on DO whenever I need it and destroy it automatically after a while. But for everything else I have a dedicated server at Hetzner.

lloeki 10y ago

We're building a specialized Rails web app that gets deployed, customized and possibly extended (via additional engines) per tenant. Having a single VM per customer is just so KISS, simplifying every step of the process, billing, security, data isolation, load management... Any other solution would become ludicrously complex in comparison, for no reason at all, buzzwords be damned.

manigandham 10y ago
What does this have to do with DO specifically? Any cloud provider can give you as many VMs as you want.