February 12, 2015

There were 2 posts published on February 12, 2015 (this is page 1 of 1).

Google Cloud and latency

Since I’ve been having so much fun with Amazon Web Services, I thought I would check out Google’s offering, called Google Cloud. I’ve only had a trial running with it for about 24 hours but so far it seems solid. The server I am using is fast and has good connectivity to Google’s servers, which is a good thing.

What is a bad thing, however, is that my hosted server has very poor connectivity to me. The round-trip ping time is about 55ms, whereas AWS with it’s Ashburn, VA datacenter gets me 25ms. Huge difference! Also, my AWS instance has 14 routers to navigate before it gets to me but my Google Cloud instance travels through a whopping 24 routers. Those packets bounce around like ping pong balls! I was hoping that with Google’s company-owned fiber network and datacenters located here in North Carolina I would get faster response times. No such luck … yet.

Why “yet?” Well, Google Fiber is coming to the Triangle, in case you’ve been under a rock. I’m hopeful once I’m on the Google Fiber network, my latency to Google Cloud will drop considerably, perhaps <1ms. This invites all sorts of innovations. Give clever developers fat resources located close (on the network, anyway) to their audience and some interesting things start to happen.

Google Fiber could be the fire that lights off Google Cloud. I figure it’s worth checking out the new landscape now so that I can get in on the game.

Up to speed on Amazon Web Services

I’ve been getting up to speed on Amazon Web Services over the past few weeks. With the end of the year bonus I got from my work I put down the money to get a 3-year reserved instance, gaining a hefty hosted server for a remarkably low price.

I’d had an Amazon instance for a few months just to kick the tires. However, when my reserved instance got purchased, it took me a while to figure out that Amazon had changed its virtualization techniques and in order to take advantage of the new instance I would have to convert my existing image to a completely new one. The blocker for this was that the CentOS-based AMI I used seemed locked and the root drive couldn’t be mounted to a new instance. I had to copy everything using the old instance.

My new instance was created completely by me, using a recipe that helped me build it from the ground up. Now that I have a good base to start from I can build some useful AMIs and share them with others. I hope to make a Rivendell Radio Automation AMI someday so that people can launch their own online radio station with a few clicks of a button.

I’ve also dug into the wonder that is S3, creating an s3fs “filesystem” on my Linux instance for serving up music for my Rivendell install. I will eventually do the same for the media included here on MT.net and push that to CloudFront.

The cool thing about the cloud is that it’s a geek’s ultimate laboratory. It’s incredibly easy and cheap to spin up computer sessions. I can play with technologies without having to commit to them long-term. I’m having a lot of fun with it.

I’m particularly proud that I was able to migrate the server that hosts my neighborhood email lists from a locally-hosted server over to AWS without any of my neighbors knowing I’d done it. I guess twenty years of sysadmin experience pays off every now and then!