Cloud Questions

[Roedy Green]

Why website is currently static. I make all changes on my desktop and
upload them hourly. I wondering what would happen if I hosted instead
on a cloud.

I can see it would work as-is easily on a cloud. Two clouds could
serve the same content to the closest customers without any change at
all. My questions are:

1. how to do you update the files of a cloud? Can I get rid of that
accursed FTP?
2. do you have to update each cloud separately, or is that considered
an automatic cloud function?

Now lets say I migrate the random functions (e.g random PSAs, random
ads, random quotations) to the cloud. Again no problem.

Now lets say I had some SQL databases that get queried to satisfy
requests. I guess then I have to upload the entire database from time
to time and propagate it? or do I? Is it considered an ordinary
function to send some sort of delta?

Now lets say I want to keep track of hit counts. I want to
consolidate the page hits from each cloud. I could download each
cloud's database consolidated and upload to each cloud. I could have
only one cloud maintain the database and other clouds access it
remotely with jdbc or something more secure. Is there some special
distributed cloud database that lazily keeps all copies in sync?

I have a lot of static content on my website. Turning every page to a
JSP servlet would make for one huge server app. What sort of
techniques are used to separate static and computed parts to glue
pages together?

I take it the locations of clouds are not your concern. They could
wander from server farm to server farm based to where the load is
coming from and there there is spare compute power. Right?

Anything else I should consider in such a move?

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

Why website is currently static. I make all changes on my desktop and
upload them hourly. I wondering what would happen if I hosted instead
on a cloud.

I can see it would work as-is easily on a cloud. Two clouds could
serve the same content to the closest customers without any change at
all. My questions are:

1. how to do you update the files of a cloud? Can I get rid of that
accursed FTP?
2. do you have to update each cloud separately, or is that considered
an automatic cloud function?

Now lets say I migrate the random functions (e.g random PSAs, random
ads, random quotations) to the cloud. Again no problem.

Now lets say I had some SQL databases that get queried to satisfy
requests. I guess then I have to upload the entire database from time
to time and propagate it? or do I? Is it considered an ordinary
function to send some sort of delta?

Now lets say I want to keep track of hit counts. I want to
consolidate the page hits from each cloud. I could download each
cloud's database consolidated and upload to each cloud. I could have
only one cloud maintain the database and other clouds access it
remotely with jdbc or something more secure. Is there some special
distributed cloud database that lazily keeps all copies in sync?

IaaS : depends on your application
PaaS : depends on your application and the clouds capabilities
SaaS : depends on the clouds capabilities

I have a lot of static content on my website. Turning every page to a
JSP servlet would make for one huge server app. What sort of
techniques are used to separate static and computed parts to glue
pages together?

A) Just let the servlet container serve both dynamic and static
content (possibly with different paths)
B) Use a servlet container for the dynamic content and a plain web
server for static content

I take it the locations of clouds are not your concern. They could
wander from server farm to server farm based to where the load is
coming from and there there is spare compute power. Right?

More or less. You will typical be able to specify region.

Anything else I should consider in such a move?

There are probably no point in moving your pages to a cloud
instead of the current web hosting solution.

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

IaaS : depends on your application
PaaS : depends on your application and the clouds capabilities
SaaS : depends on the clouds capabilities


A) Just let the servlet container serve both dynamic and static
content (possibly with different paths)
B) Use a servlet container for the dynamic content and a plain web
server for static content


More or less. You will typical be able to specify region.


There are probably no point in moving your pages to a cloud
instead of the current web hosting solution.

Even if your traffic suddenly grew by a factor 1000, then you should
probably look for a CDN not for IaaS/PaaS/IaaS. The CDN provider
may then use IaaS/PaaS/IaaS.

Arne

 

[Roedy Green]

Anything else I should consider in such a move?

I have been digging around. Interesting things I learned I have
posted at:

http://mindprod.com/jgloss/cloudstorage.html
http://mindprod.com/jgloss/ec2.html
http://mindprod.com/jgloss/openstack.html

The main thing I discovered is distributed databases now exist.
I have just scratched the surface. This is a far more interesting new
area that I imagined it would be.

 

[Roedy Green]

CDN not for IaaS/PaaS/IaaS.

CDN = Content Delivery Network

 

[Roedy Green]

Even if your traffic suddenly grew by a factor 1000, then you should
probably look for a CDN not for IaaS/PaaS/IaaS.

I have done some digging into the CDN, CloudFlare.

I have posted what I have discovered:

http://mindprod.com/jgloss/cloudflare.html

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

I'd say you could do as well by using either scp or sftp in a script-
driven solution:

- use sftp to pull back a list of published pages and the dates and times
of publication
- the script uses that list to generate sftp 'put' commands for all
unpublished and altered pages and 'rm' for all published pages that
you've deleted from the local collection.
- feed the file of put & rm commands to the sftp utility to do the page
transfers and deletions.

...where the 'script' could be written Perl, python, awk or even be a
Java application.

Java and Apache Common Net is not a bad solution for some
advanced FTP'ing, if one is fluent in Java.

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

The main thing I discovered is distributed databases now exist.
I have just scratched the surface. This is a far more interesting new
area that I imagined it would be.

If you need to process PB of data, then that is necesarry.

Arne