Comments on: Cloud provider support

By: David Mytton

David Mytton — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 10:37:27 +0000

Rimuhosting blog on how to use the new cloud support with their hosting service: http://blog.rimuhosting.com/2010/01/26/rimuhosting-api-with-server-density/

By: David Mytton

David Mytton — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 17:28:13 +0000

It depends on your definition of “cloud”. Slicehost servers are virtualised machines available on demand so I suppose you can call them “cloud” servers. The advantage with our support for Slicehost only really exists if you have a lot of slices, or if you’re installing for the first time and just want to import your existing data.

By: Stephen Korecky

Stephen Korecky — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 16:31:04 +0000

I’m a little confused about the terminology since Slicehost (who I use) is on the list who offers VPS servers. Are you considering VPS servers as a cloud? If so what (if any) are the differences from setting up sd manually vs. your new setup tool? Thanks!

By: Adrian (from vzaar)

Adrian (from vzaar) — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 17:58:06 +0000

Thanks, we’ll probably look at the auto-deploy script for the moment.

You might want to think about a future feature where you can group or cluster servers together to monitor an aggregate as well as individual servers.

By: David Mytton

David Mytton — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 17:50:17 +0000

> 1. Is the cost for cloud monitoring the same as agent monitoring?

Yes.

> 2. What would you recommend implementation wise, in the case where we may have servers appearing and disappearing as needed . Would it possible to do agent (or even cloud) monitoring in this case.

At the moment the importing of cloud servers is completely manual; mainly because EC2 is the only provider that has extra features. It’s certainly possible that we could add the ability to poll your server list and automatically pull new EC2 servers in and start monitoring them. However, right now you can’t do it.

Therefore you could either do it manually or you could use our auto deploy script – a couple of customers already do this. It’d run as part of your instance startup process and automatically installs the agent, then registers the server with your Server Density account using our API. See http://www.serverdensity.com/docs/agent/autodeploy/

> 3. What would you recommend for a situation when you have several servers as clones of each other

This is something that can’t really be handled right now. Each server exists independently within Server Density and has to have it’s own unique key.

By: Adrian (from vzaar)

Adrian (from vzaar) — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 16:26:23 +0000

We’re shifting some components of our architecture to be more automatically scalable using Cloudwatch, Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scale, so this is quite timely. I do have a few questions on this.

1. Is the cost for cloud monitoring the same as agent monitoring?
2. What would you recommend implementation wise, in the case where we may have servers appearing and disappearing as needed . Would it possible to do agent (or even cloud) monitoring in this case.
3. What would you recommend for a situation when you have several servers as clones of each other (right now have 2 but assume we grow to multiple). We probably care more about the load over all the servers than any particular server. Any thoughts?

This is an issue we’ll have to tackle with many of our providers (New Relic, Get Exceptional, you guys), so I’d be curious to your thoughts on this.

If you’d prefer to contact me directly via email on this, thats fine too.

Adrian
vzaar.com

By: Amazon EC2 monitoring, auto scaling & load balancing « Boxed Ice Blog

Amazon EC2 monitoring, auto scaling & load balancing « Boxed Ice Blog — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 16:22:08 +0000

[...] & load balancing 2009 May 18 by David Mytton Update 17th Jan 2010: Server Density now supports CloudWatch and can automatically pull in data from [...]