

Introducing NodeBalancer, load-balancer-as-a-service - jonknee
http://blog.linode.com/2011/07/13/introducing-nodebalancer/

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siculars
I've set up high availability load balancers on linode before. Basically two
512mb vm's running heartbeat between them and both running the same config of
haproxy. This seems like a spiffy interface to something like that minus the
heartbeat.

What is going on here under the hood? Anybody know? Haven't seen any deep
details yet. Then again, I haven't logged into their irc either.

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j_baker
What's the big deal? I'd really like to know too. I'm not just asking that to
be snarky. :-)

AWS and a few other hosts[1] have had this for a while. Is Linode doing
anything differently, or is this just an instance of another (big name)
hosting company joining the fray?

[1] like contegix: <http://www.contegix.com/infrastructure/load-balancing.php>

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Bobby_Tables
This isn't a big deal in terms of being revolutionary. I doubt they're doing
anything differently than anyone else...load-balancing web servers is a pretty
well-solved problem at this point. What's a big deal is that Linode already
has many fans around here and this makes their product better for a
significant portion of their users without adding a lot of cost.

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brandoncordell
I just happened to have been in my linode control panel a lot the past few
days and noticed the new tab. I don't think I could have clicked the link any
faster. I had to do a double take when I saw 19.95. I almost thought they
meant per day.

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HowardRoark
I wonder what they use on the backend to power this. Anyone knows?

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paraschopra
Most likely they would be using Nginx. I find the offering interesting because
most of the companies in need of a load balancer would be able to configure
Nginx load balancer quite easily. Not knowing underlying technology and not
being able to go deep into modifying the algorithms and other aspects of load
balancer makes me slightly uncomfortable, so why should we go with it? The
only positive aspect of this offering is automatic health check but Nginx does
that already.

I think this offering is nothing more than a GUI for generating nginx
configuration files.

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dangrossman
Most people able to launch and configure Amazon AMIs could configure Nginx
too. Yet Amazon offers Elastic Load Balancers. There's a huge market for stuff
like this -- just because you can muddle your way through configuring an
instance doesn't mean you _want_ to be in charge of configuring and running
all the moving parts.

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Swannie
Whooo.

One less thing for linode sysadmins to worry about. This is a good move, up
there with offering bullet proof DNS services in my opinion.

Edit: shame that the API doesn't look like it supports alarms/thresholds.

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joeshaw
Does anybody know if these work across data centers? I can't find anything
about it in the documentation they have.

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rkalla
Joe, if you look at the Howto it shows when you setup the balancer you assign
it to a data center (like NJ) and I assume it balances nodes only in that data
center otherwise what would be the point of assigning the BalancerNode itself
to a data center?

At least that is my thinking.

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locopati
Does the price seem steep to anyone, seeing as it's the same price as 512MB
virt but does only load balancing?

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mrinterweb
If your stack requires a load balancer, you would have to pay $19.95 for a
dedicated 512 node that you would need to then configure and manage your own
load balancer. This new service is also managed, distributed, and has an API.
$19.95/month seems like a steal to me.

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jsprinkles
One Linode 512 is not highly available. Two is. The documentation indicates
that this service is highly-available.

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mrinterweb
True. I was intending to draw a comparison to what kind of load balancing you
can get on Linode for $19.95 if you were to do it yourself. I highly doubt it
is possible to roll a superior load balancer service on your own for less than
NodeBalancer.

I was recently trying to figure out how I was going to handle this on Linode.
I am very glad to see this new service. If NodeBalancer has the ability to
fail over to other data centers in the instance of a data center wide outage
then I'll be set.

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guildchatter
Sweet! I <3 Linode.

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