4 ms·

Introducing Linodes in Frankfurt

62 points by akerl_ 11y ago

machbio 11y ago
Amazing effort by Linode that they keep striving to improve and have pushed up a gear to new features unlike years ago but Linode has the storage problem where they only offer SSD disk storage and there is nothing comparable to AWS S3 or even their SSD disk rates are not comparable to EBS - I do understand that Linode's SSD are better performance wise but when I do not need the performance I have no other options.. There is a bigger problem with Linodes is the Linode Images[1], how do they expect the disk images to be less than 2GB and here goes there policy on images- "There is no additional charge to store images for Linode users, with a limit of 2GB per Image, with a total of 10GB total Image storage and 100 Images per account." [1]https://www.linode.com/docs/platform/linode-images https://www.linode.com/docs/platform/linode-images
- akerl_ 11y ago
  I've had no problems using Linode Images with that as the limit. I use it to pre-bake some package updates that take a while so that I can use the image to provision new systems: https://github.com/dock0/vm_config/blob/master/meta/image-build.rb https://github.com/dock0/vm_config/blob/master/meta/image-bu... https://github.com/dock0/vm_config/blob/master/meta/deploy.rb https://github.com/dock0/vm_config/blob/master/meta/deploy.r...
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  >nlike years ago but Linode has the storage problem where they only offer SSD disk storage Are you confusing them with Digital Ocean? Their SSD option is fairly new, and much, much later than DO's offerings. Linode announced offering SSDs in April of 2014. https://blog.linode.com/2014/04/17/linode-cloud-ssds-double-ram-much-more/ https://blog.linode.com/2014/04/17/linode-cloud-ssds-double-...
  - jsight 11y ago
    AFAIK, linode currently only offers SSD storage. I agree that this can be a problem for some use-cases. Vultr is often a better alternative for people who require large storage with lighter performance requirements.
- HappyTypist 11y ago
  Linode Images aren't intended to store data or function as a backup. (They have a separate paid feature for that). It's to help you provision new linodes. I do echo your thoughts on that they should offer a HDD-backed storage instance plan, however.
wiremine 11y ago
Nice to see Linode adding another data center! Off-top, but (hopefully) interesting: We've been using Linode to host an Aerospike [1] cluster. They're one of the few cloud providers that give you direct raw access to the SSD drives. (Raw being you can mount an unformatted SSD partition). Performance has been stellar. [1] http://www.aerospike.com/ http://www.aerospike.com/
msh 11y ago
Do anyone know if you can easily move servers to a new linode datacentre?
- eli 11y ago
  Yes, just open a support ticket. It's tricky if you want to do it without any downtime though.
chubot 11y ago
Related question -- does anyone run a site which is hosted in multiple locations? Say you have a read-only site, and you have one copy in the Fremont CA data center, one in Frankfurt, and one in Asia. How do you direct users to the closest one network-wise? (For static content, you can offload this problem to a CDN, but I'm wondering if you can do it just on Linode) An old way to do it would be to have the users choose and set a cookie that redirects. But I wonder if you can do it transparently, like Google or Yahoo. Is there a DNS trick which implements this, or something else?
- samtho 11y ago
  Round Robbin DNS[0] is a simple method for balancing HTTP requests, done entirely at the nameserver. Let's say you have 3 servers, located at 3 separate IP addresses. You create multiple A-Records, each pointing to a different IP address, and (in theory) the client will choose the fastest connection. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-robin_DNS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-robin_DNS
  - chubot 11y ago
    Would clients actually choose the fastest connection? That page says that the client will typically choose the first address, so you can use this for load distribution among servers, but it doesn't say anything about client latency. If I have 5K users in US, 2K in Europe, and 1K in Asia, I wouldn't want the traffic to evenly distributed. I would want users to go to the closest/fastest server. The StackOverflow post above looks like a good start.
- Spittie 11y ago
  The easiest way would be to use GeoDNS. You just have your DNS server send out a different IP according to the IP of the request. See http://www.caraytech.com/geodns/ http://www.caraytech.com/geodns/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodns I've found this nice answer on StackOverlow that show the differences between Anycast, GeoDNS and using an http redirect: http://stackoverflow.com/a/25678199 http://stackoverflow.com/a/25678199
vfclists 11y ago
How do you get a custom 32 Bit image running on Linode, on both Xen and KVM? I tried to get a KVM system running and I failed after going through a hard time. Why don't they simply make it OpenStack compatible so you can run a KVM system like it should? My free credit is going to waste!!

62 points by akerl_ 11y ago

Amazing effort by Linode that they keep striving to improve and have pushed up a gear to new features unlike years ago but Linode has the storage problem where they only offer SSD disk storage and there is nothing comparable to AWS S3 or even their SSD disk rates are not comparable to EBS - I do understand that Linode's SSD are better performance wise but when I do not need the performance I have no other options.. There is a bigger problem with Linodes is the Linode Images[1], how do they expect the disk images to be less than 2GB and here goes there policy on images- "There is no additional charge to store images for Linode users, with a limit of 2GB per Image, with a total of 10GB total Image storage and 100 Images per account." [1]https://www.linode.com/docs/platform/linode-images https://www.linode.com/docs/platform/linode-images

akerl_ 11y ago
I've had no problems using Linode Images with that as the limit. I use it to pre-bake some package updates that take a while so that I can use the image to provision new systems: https://github.com/dock0/vm_config/blob/master/meta/image-build.rb https://github.com/dock0/vm_config/blob/master/meta/image-bu... https://github.com/dock0/vm_config/blob/master/meta/deploy.rb https://github.com/dock0/vm_config/blob/master/meta/deploy.r...
drzaiusapelord 11y ago
>nlike years ago but Linode has the storage problem where they only offer SSD disk storage Are you confusing them with Digital Ocean? Their SSD option is fairly new, and much, much later than DO's offerings. Linode announced offering SSDs in April of 2014. https://blog.linode.com/2014/04/17/linode-cloud-ssds-double-ram-much-more/ https://blog.linode.com/2014/04/17/linode-cloud-ssds-double-...
- jsight 11y ago
  AFAIK, linode currently only offers SSD storage. I agree that this can be a problem for some use-cases. Vultr is often a better alternative for people who require large storage with lighter performance requirements.
HappyTypist 11y ago
Linode Images aren't intended to store data or function as a backup. (They have a separate paid feature for that). It's to help you provision new linodes. I do echo your thoughts on that they should offer a HDD-backed storage instance plan, however.

wiremine 11y ago

Nice to see Linode adding another data center! Off-top, but (hopefully) interesting: We've been using Linode to host an Aerospike [1] cluster. They're one of the few cloud providers that give you direct raw access to the SSD drives. (Raw being you can mount an unformatted SSD partition). Performance has been stellar. [1] http://www.aerospike.com/ http://www.aerospike.com/

msh 11y ago

Do anyone know if you can easily move servers to a new linode datacentre?

eli 11y ago
Yes, just open a support ticket. It's tricky if you want to do it without any downtime though.

chubot 11y ago

Related question -- does anyone run a site which is hosted in multiple locations? Say you have a read-only site, and you have one copy in the Fremont CA data center, one in Frankfurt, and one in Asia. How do you direct users to the closest one network-wise? (For static content, you can offload this problem to a CDN, but I'm wondering if you can do it just on Linode) An old way to do it would be to have the users choose and set a cookie that redirects. But I wonder if you can do it transparently, like Google or Yahoo. Is there a DNS trick which implements this, or something else?

samtho 11y ago
Round Robbin DNS[0] is a simple method for balancing HTTP requests, done entirely at the nameserver. Let's say you have 3 servers, located at 3 separate IP addresses. You create multiple A-Records, each pointing to a different IP address, and (in theory) the client will choose the fastest connection. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-robin_DNS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-robin_DNS
- chubot 11y ago
  Would clients actually choose the fastest connection? That page says that the client will typically choose the first address, so you can use this for load distribution among servers, but it doesn't say anything about client latency. If I have 5K users in US, 2K in Europe, and 1K in Asia, I wouldn't want the traffic to evenly distributed. I would want users to go to the closest/fastest server. The StackOverflow post above looks like a good start.
Spittie 11y ago
The easiest way would be to use GeoDNS. You just have your DNS server send out a different IP according to the IP of the request. See http://www.caraytech.com/geodns/ http://www.caraytech.com/geodns/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodns I've found this nice answer on StackOverlow that show the differences between Anycast, GeoDNS and using an http redirect: http://stackoverflow.com/a/25678199 http://stackoverflow.com/a/25678199

vfclists 11y ago

How do you get a custom 32 Bit image running on Linode, on both Xen and KVM? I tried to get a KVM system running and I failed after going through a hard time. Why don't they simply make it OpenStack compatible so you can run a KVM system like it should? My free credit is going to waste!!