
Show HN: GoScale Cloud Scaling in Milliseconds - ColinHayhurst
http://goscale.com/servers
======
bensummers
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
It's nothing new on Linux either. OpenVz / Virtuozzo and LXC provides the same
for Linux. OpenVz has been around for years.

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

[Edit: Remove comment about spam]

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jamescun
We have built on top of the ground work of Linux Containers, and as well as
building an API for it, we have made some deep system modifications to allow
containers to do things which you would assume only paravirualisation could
do. We are neither OS level nor Paravirtualisation, its a blurry point
inbetween to get the best of both worlds.

Edit: Apologies for the spam, we misconfigured our emailing software.

~~~
bensummers
If your aim is to be a PaaS vendor, you'd probably able to put something
together much more quickly and cheaply by just licensing Joyent's
SmartDataCenter product and building anything else you need on top of that.
And then you'd be running it on a kernel which has been tried and tested over
decades on many sites, rather than your own unique kernel modifications.

[Edit: Remove comment about spam]

~~~
late2part
Translation:

I work for Joyent and think you are threatening us. You should not innovate,
but use our stuff because we think its the best and don't think you can take
any of our market share, but please don't try!

~~~
ColinHayhurst
Ben doesn't work for Joyent but thanks :)

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encoderer
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.

~~~
ColinHayhurst
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
> 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.

~~~
ColinHayhurst
I'm sure you are right. Thanks for the reminder

------
moe
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.

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

~~~
regularfry
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.

~~~
NyxWulf
That's the difference between guaranteed capacity and most services. It's very
common to use the properties of normal usage patterns and pool the excess
capacity. The phone system has done that for ages. Ever try to make a call
during an emergency?

Just because their service doesn't cover certain extreme situations does not
mean it's worthless. It would worth knowing how much excess capacity they are
pooling together, but vendors generally won't release those types of details.

~~~
regularfry
I supposed that's the point I was working towards: they must be overcommitted,
so it's a funny thing to be cagey about. The exact numbers don't matter as
much.

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fcoury
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.

~~~
jamescun
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.

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

~~~
ColinHayhurst
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.

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

~~~
ColinHayhurst
We fully intend to offer a transition to GoScale, for StackBlaze users, if
they want it. They've been informed of that. But it's a fair question though.
The change of company was a consequence of our funding sources.

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dollar
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.

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

~~~
regularfry
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.

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

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scottallison
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 :)

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johnnymonster
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!

~~~
ColinHayhurst
Yep, you've spotted one good use case

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morgen
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.

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rodly
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.

~~~
benreyes
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

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

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k4st
How is something like the JVM handled (when scaling down), which seems averse
to letting go of its memory?

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

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tedunangst
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!

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

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

~~~
benreyes
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.

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

~~~
jamescun
Thanks. :)

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

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

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ilija139
Is he chewing something while he talks?

~~~
jamescun
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!

