Cloud/IaaS GSP?

[pjdaley]

Hey Everyone, I haven't posted in a while, pretty much been lurking

 

The company that I work for is a data center in central Arizona(trying to be as vague as possible on a public post), and has developed a new service that they are offering. It is "cloud" based hosting, more so it is an Infrastructure as a Service. Creates VM that are completely scalable and that are rock solid from 1 vcpu -8, .5GB ram-16GB, and 10GB HDD to 1TB. Uses ESX, NetApps, quad 10gbit connections from multiple carriers and is already load balanced. The machines that are created already have a configurable software firewall as well as a load balancer that con be configured via a GUI. It is currently in Beta and will be for a while, allowing users to sign up for free and mess with the admin, create, destroy, clone, etc... VM's. After the beta it is a pay as you use service, so if it is not being used, you basically pay nothing for it.

 

I did a quick search on here and didn't see much along the lines of Cloud/IaaS, minus the one post for Amazon EC2. I guess I have a few questions.

 

* Would a pay as you use service provide a better option for end users(people who rent the servers)?

* Would this lower the "hey I don't want the server any more" after 15-30 days and not having them renew the subscription?

* Would having access to the "clouds" racks and racks and racks of servers, blades, storage units, f5 load balancers be something a gsp wants?

* VM's as of this point are CentOS, RedHat, Windows Server 2003/2008 std/ent/R2

* One of the primary providers is Level3 with a direct line to their backbone

* The company that is doing this new cloud beta, is also the company that owns the data center and is a major network access provider to many ISP's, regional, national and global

*** Is actually in the Phoenix Area, I have yet to find GSP's in this area at all, but know plenty of people that would give a leg to have servers in this area

 

Finnaly,

Would using these in a IaaS environment be a viable option for GSP's? It would be considerably cheaper than having to rent dedicated servers. The end user talks directly with the data center NOC engineers regarding their services rather than 2nd, 3rd, or 4th parties that need to contact their "NOCs" NOC. The GSP would pay hourly based on the processor used, bandwidth used, and storage used. If the VM is turned off, you pay next to nothing, if it is turned on, you obviously pay for what is being used.

 

One thing I wanted to note is that VM's can be setup with templates, saved, cloned, moved, reconfigured on the fly, APIs could be created fro WHMCS, etc... I am writing this because I am truly interested in getting back into the "game" now that I have the time and the capital, but also to start an actual discussion on this. I have been following it for quite a while, and I am tired of paying monthly for servers in the $80-$200 range, when you can get a better, more reliable, more stable, and better hosted and connected server cheaper by hosting through the cloud/IaaS

 

edit: I might have put this in the wrong section :-x

[Lane]

I would have to say you are most likely not going to find a very large market in the gaming world for cloud services.

 

In most cases the cloud cannot withstand the requirements of a game servers on both the HDD latency / throughput as well as it will demand more CPU than most clouds are built to withstand - as they are usually designed for high RAM, web hosting situations and in turn you end up with falling short on pure horse power (well, without paying out the ass for it).

 

With that in mind, I highly doubt that your cloud is all that cheap. Most clouds are quite a bit more expensive than a dedicated server for the fact that the NAS systems alone (when built correctly) are very expensive let alone 20 or more head machines and network.

 

Other than that, I am guessing you are at PhoenixNAP with everyone else who is trying to sell them as the hot new location.

[pjdaley]

I am not trying to sell them, I am trying to get a feel for the route I should go personally. From what I understand they are looking to be most cost effective than other cloud solutions.

 

As I mentioned previously, racks upon racks of hardware, and plenty of storage space would never be a problem. I would be interested in more information in regards to:

In most cases the cloud cannot withstand the requirements of a game servers on both the HDD latency / throughput as well as it will demand more CPU than most clouds are built to withstand - as they are usually designed for high RAM

 

Not trying to be a jerk, just looking for honest feedback

[Lane]

I am not trying to sell them, I am trying to get a feel for the route I should go personally. From what I understand they are looking to be most cost effective than other cloud solutions.

 

As I mentioned previously, racks upon racks of hardware, and plenty of storage space would never be a problem. I would be interested in more information in regards to:

 

Not trying to be a jerk, just looking for honest feedback

 

Not sure what you are asking, the above is pretty much it unless you are looking for benchmarks of some sort.

[pjdaley]

Oh, I was pretty much asking from where you got that information. Have you tested it on a cloud before? If so, can I ask what the specs were? Were you using ESX, or Xen, or something else. Were you using a Netapp Filer? Just looking for a little more information sorry.

[Nisd]

Well to be honest running a GSP in the cloud would be a dream.

IF (VERY BIG IF) you could scale the CPU probably.

 

Problem with most clouds is that they are designed to scale out not up.

Scale out is where you add a core or 2, or just a new machine.

 

But most game servers only runs on single CPU Threads, so they require high core speeds if you want a stable server that is full.

[pjdaley]

Well, I would love to talk more about it. I can tell you that the hardware is all brand new and top of the line with no expense spared. I was also thinking of making a custom disto specifically for running servers on that can be deployed instantly.

 

I would love to hear from people that have at least tried this and their end results with it

[Lane]

I have tried various 'cloud' solutions and anytime you place the disks in another machine you end up adding a lot of latency compared to DS.

 

With that, like above the CPU's can only be so powerful and based on what is on the market you are most like either a ton of ~E3-1270 or ~X5650's as just about anything else would destroy your bottom line (that's assume you are not still using E5620's like most).

 

Beyond that, you are sharing resources with others and every time you do that someone is going to get the short end of the stick, no matter how you cut - usually it comes down to disk I/O being destroyed by someone else 'abusing - aka using the system'.

 

Game servers do not do well when their are other things running next to them, some even have issues with other kinds of game engines running next to them, let alone running them in a virtualized environment.

 

You can also take RO2 as an example, runs like complete crap on anything virtualized...

 

I deal with cloud solutions daily as we migrate clients away from other providers to 'real' solutions.

[adamnp]

I have to agree with Lane - We really wouldn't be interested in this for the same reasons, regardless of the Datacenter.

 

I think if there was a market for this, you would already see it in use for the low end providers. I'm not aware of any GSP's that utilize a cloud environment currently. Great thought, I just don't think the software is geared towards demanding gaming servers.

[Nisd]

So I have been looking a bit on this now, and I think with a lot of development time, and limited funds for hardware it might actually be possible to make something a lot like this.

 

The only problem is that most cloud services is made to run stateless application where in this case you got games servers that has state.

 

So either you would only be able to move servers around during downtime/no players on, or use some sort of live migration, in the style of what Hyper-V provides. But then again you would need a very simple and small foot printed operation system to accomplish that. Chances are that this setup would end up a mainly linux setup, and you would need to run it on your own systems, as this is not really a cloud, as much as it is a Cluster.