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Friend of doppenhe here. Amazon, heroku etc aren't fast enough for us due to spin-up time. Basically when we get a particular command from a user, we need to d

Friend of doppenhe here. Amazon, heroku etc aren't fast enough for us due to spin-up time. Basically when we get a particular command from a user, we need to do a LOT computation on many parallel machines, but for a short burst of time. Keeping a whole cluster of machines reserved would be prohibitively expensive at this stage. We would prefer to keep a small base-load capacity reserved, and then spin up a large number of instance for a short time. Response time is key here. It would be best if they were already up and running, waiting for a command, but idle most of the time. Fine if it's shared with others. Kind of like a computation insurance for short bursts of high-demand. Anyone know any services like that?

benologist 14y ago
What about cheap dedicateds? In the US Hivelocity have great prices - http://hivelocity.net/ http://hivelocity.net/ In Europe there's also Hetzner - http://www.hetzner.de/en/ http://www.hetzner.de/en/
kintamanimatt 14y ago
There's always going to be some time associated with creating a VPS. You're not going to get a new VPS instance allocated in seconds simply due to these practical issues. For this reason you may need to keep some idle servers running if you really need a high level of responsiveness. It sounds like your real issue is cost. Perhaps two options you might consider: buy (don't rent) your own hardware and get some colo space nearby. It can work out significantly cheaper and neither the hardware or rackspace has to be expensive. The second option to minimize costs would be to rewrite the key parts of your algorithms in something like C, if you haven't already. If you're doing the heavy lifting in something like Ruby, or even Java, you're going to be wasting a lot of resources in a situation where it sounds like every cycle counts. Hope this helps.
tectonic 14y ago
Amazon EC2 Spot Instances?

benologist 14y ago

What about cheap dedicateds? In the US Hivelocity have great prices - http://hivelocity.net/ http://hivelocity.net/ In Europe there's also Hetzner - http://www.hetzner.de/en/ http://www.hetzner.de/en/

kintamanimatt 14y ago

There's always going to be some time associated with creating a VPS. You're not going to get a new VPS instance allocated in seconds simply due to these practical issues. For this reason you may need to keep some idle servers running if you really need a high level of responsiveness. It sounds like your real issue is cost. Perhaps two options you might consider: buy (don't rent) your own hardware and get some colo space nearby. It can work out significantly cheaper and neither the hardware or rackspace has to be expensive. The second option to minimize costs would be to rewrite the key parts of your algorithms in something like C, if you haven't already. If you're doing the heavy lifting in something like Ruby, or even Java, you're going to be wasting a lot of resources in a situation where it sounds like every cycle counts. Hope this helps.

tectonic 14y ago

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances?