Show HN: GoScale Cloud Scaling in Milliseconds

by ColinHayhurst • 14 years ago

118 60 14 years ago

bst• 14 years ago

I came across GoScale two weeks ago. As somebody passionate about server technology I was both intrigued and very skeptical. Frankly I thought it was another MVP that would never appear.

So I contacted them asking for more information, expecting little. To my surprise they couldn't have been more approachable and friendly and gave me one of their first 10 test accounts. I was staggered to find it worked exactly as they said it would.

I'm already planning to put my next app on it so I just hope it's ready in time to host it.

justincormack• 14 years ago

So you created an account to say this. Sockpuppet I think.

morgen• 14 years ago

One way to trial this might be on dev servers that run automated tests. I wonder if a dynamically scaling test server could run our continuous integration tests more rapidly without significantly increasing server costs.

bensummers3• 14 years ago

This "virtual server resizing" and sub-second VM booting is nothing new to Solaris users, who've been quietly doing it for years with Zones. Of course, you have to use Solaris to take advantage of flexibility in dynamically changing any resource allocation, including disc, CPU, networking and memory.

It sounds like GoScale is bringing memory allocation resizing to Linux guests, which is handy. If it's done with KVM, it would be interesting to see if it can be added to the Joyent Solaris KVM port.

Free Solarish OSes for playing with Solaris Zones: http://smartos.org/ (from Joyent) and http://omnios.omniti.com/

vidarh• 14 years ago

It's nothing new on Linux either. OpenVz / Virtuozzo and LXC provides the same for Linux. OpenVz has been around for years.

bensummers3• 14 years ago

So what's the magic in GoScale? Adding an API?

[Edit: Remove comment about spam]

whyleyc• 14 years ago

Is this a replacement for your current offering at http://stackblaze.com/ or a new company ?

ColinHayhurst7• 14 years ago

It's a new company but the same team. StackBlaze PaaS is still up and running and serving existing customers, but no further development is being done on it.

ceejayoz2• 14 years ago

What would cause GoScale to receive the same fate? Not enough interest in the platform?

moe4• 14 years ago

That seems like a rather strange concept.

In practice they will have to drastically undersell their hosts in order to guarantee the burst-capacity.

If you need to reserve 8G for my 256M instance because I could burst to 8G at any time - then why not just sell me the 8G instance directly?

Perhaps they have some really interesting use for this "volatile" spare-capacity (something like the EC2 spot-market?), but that seems like an awfully complex endeavor.

jamescun6• 14 years ago

We have developed a unique way to increase density however still allow you to resize your instance in under 500 ms.

moe4• 14 years ago

Can you give more details on that?

What happens when I have, say, 50x 512M instances and decide to resize them all at once to 8G? Or do you generally limit the burst-capacity to twice the base-capacity?

regularfry5• 14 years ago

That's not really answering the question, is it? Increasing density just means you get to buy fewer servers. It doesn't deal with the problem of everyone on a maxed-out server asking for an increase at the same time.

kensnyder• 14 years ago

The need is there. Looking forward to taking it for a test drive.

fcoury• 14 years ago

Even the most magical cloud in the world is backed up by real computers with real memory constraints. No matter what happens, one time or the other this memory constraint will be hit and then I doubt it will take only 500ms to resize the instance. Either that or, as someone pointed out, you'll end up with an aggressively undersold platform and that will have a toll on pricing.

But regardless, I am curious to see how this develops.

jamescun6• 14 years ago

We are confident that we are able to maintain a reasonable density as well as offer an affordable price, as well as the ability to live resize.

Of course there is a real world limit, but this is true of all clouds and of all things in general.

ilija139• 14 years ago

Is he chewing something while he talks?

jamescun6• 14 years ago

I must apologise, we are both currently recovering from a bad cold. While 99% gone, its still lingering on a word or two. No illness or ailment can stop a developer!

spinlocked• 14 years ago

Great stuff. This is big, if you can pull it off.

jamescun6• 14 years ago

Thanks. :)

secoif• 14 years ago

Ironically, the site doesn't scale very well on an iPhone.

benreyes3• 14 years ago

I'm really sorry about that, thanks for bringing it up Secoif. I've just pushed a quick fix. The website was supposed to be fully responsive to iPhone/iPad resolutions using various javascript and flexible width methods.

Unfortunately I made a change to video providers (to VidYard for analytics) which broke the video resize script (FitVids-JS). Whoops, my mistake.

tedunangst• 14 years ago

jesus, I was like why do I care about a blank page? Whether on purpose or not, the "pages" are sized exactly the same size as my viewport (900 height screen). Give me a hint there's a little something down there to scroll to!

benreyes3• 14 years ago

Good point. I'll probably add in some background textures, images next time. Perhaps also a next / back buttons along with a current page indicator. Any other suggestions towards how it'll signify a scroll action towards more content would be welcome.

I did on purposely have the 'pages' resize directly to the user's viewport using javascript as a visual style of design.

cschmidt• 14 years ago

I also missed that there was anything to scroll down to see, before seeing this comment. A very dangerous page design.

rodly• 14 years ago

Your graphic depicting Server Load vs Server Instance is kind of choppy. Kind of left me feeling like I would experience a lag in your service. Good luck anyways.

benreyes3• 14 years ago

Cheers rodly! Yeah I'm definitely not happy with it and want to fix that/get it re-done if we decide to keep it. I'll most likely have it stop animating after a while and also only load when it's in view. It's something one of us threw hacked together really quickly with HighCharts.js

dollar• 14 years ago

What is the target application and who is the target customer or this service? It seems like a solution looking for a problem. How often does an application need to burst, but only within the resoure limits of a single VM? The problem of burst capacity seems solved already by simply scaling the number of instances in a well designed architecture.

moe4• 14 years ago

but only within the resoure limits of a single VM?

I suppose the normal usage pattern would be to rent as many of their smallest VMs as needed for your base-load, and then scale them up simultaneously when more capacity is needed.

It does sound intriguing, but I'm honestly rather skeptical about the feasibility of this (at scale) with today's virtualization tech.

regularfry5• 14 years ago

You're assumiung a "well designed architecture" - and you're assuming that "well designed" maps to "perfectly horizontally scalable". Neither assumption need hold.

regularfry5• 14 years ago

Oh, also: while I have no idea how this is actually implemented, under perfect conditions it's possible that this might be able to balloon your container in response to a page fault. That means you get instant scaling, rather than the couple of minutes it takes to spin new VM instances up.

johnnymonster• 14 years ago

Would love to know how this affects my bottom line! if my servers are basically running idle, it would be great if they use as little resources (and money) as possible. Then at any moment they can scale up when needed!

ColinHayhurst7• 14 years ago

Yep, you've spotted one good use case

encoderer• 14 years ago

I gave you my email address before coming here and reading the comments. Now I regret it.

I feel like the representatives of GoScale here are not doing themselves much good. They offer vague answers and hand-wavy descriptions. We all get that you have trade secrets. But If your business is jeopardized by just describing how your infrastructure works, that should worry you.

This is your "Show HN." You chose to do this. You should be generating excitement and buzz. I suggest taking a look at how Dropbox or even Tarsnap have talked about infrastructure in comparison to how you're doing it here. Talk about what you've built. It will spark respect and excitement around your brand. Lots of people have a real affection for Dropbox. That doesn't happen on accident.

I'm sure my advice here isn't unequivocally good. But it's a counterpoint I think you should consider.

ColinHayhurst7• 14 years ago

Fair enough. I can see your point. We'll try and do that.

Rather than talk much, at this stage, about what we've built we decided to make it a priority to make the service available sooner, rather than later, so people can test it, break it and benchmark it.

Our purpose is not generate buzz but more, right now, to engage with people who want to try out the technology at this early stage.

atlassic• 14 years ago

> to engage with people who want to try out the technology at this early stage

I suspect that group of people (those who want to try the early stage) intersects enormously with the group of people put off by hand-wavey dismissals of concerns about the infrastructure they use.

What you've built is cool, but you're selling to sceptical and curious early adopters. Keep that in mind.

scottallison• 14 years ago

This is cool. We currently host our app with Engine Yard and there's been a number of times when we've wanted to put in extra capacity for short bursts but it's impractical to do it. It's not the cost of upgrading for me that's the problem but the hassle of having to configure a new instance, and migrate to it. So I love the approach of dragging a few sliders and it magically happening. Go GoScale :)

salimmadjd• 14 years ago

By its name, I assumed it was heroku for Go code. Probably unfortunate, with Golang gaining steam.

peterwwillis• 14 years ago

If only scaling a web app were as easy as adding memory...

mcarvin• 14 years ago

signed up and eagerly anticipating release. would drive enormous efficiencies in our business.

k4st• 14 years ago

How is something like the JVM handled (when scaling down), which seems averse to letting go of its memory?

Show HN: GoScale Cloud Scaling in Milliseconds

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