[ale] Alright, it's time to move on from Linode

[Justin Caratzas]

On 1/8/16 7:23 PM, Jeremy T. Bouse wrote:
> On 1/8/2016 5:39 PM, James Sumners wrote:
>> On Fri, Jan 8, 2016 at 1:13 PM, chip <chip.gwyn at gmail.com
>> <mailto:chip.gwyn at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>     Take a look at Vultr.com, can do it there.  They have hosting in
>>     Atlanta too.  They're basically the economy choopa stuff.  
>>
>>
>> That's looking rather nice. $5/mo for 1TB of transfer and plenty of
>> resources for my needs.
> Not that I have any horse in the race or anything, but as a cloud
> service consumer here's a few of my observations...
>
> First off, I have/currently use LInode, AWS and DigitalOcean... Mainly
> for one simple reason, all 3 providers have good support with SaltStack
> so I don't actually have to log into their UI to do anything to manage
> my servers from cradle to grave.
>
> I will say I did look at Vultr and they do have some nice features and
> it does appear that Apache libcloud [1] does have support for Vultr
> which would make a SaltStack salt-cloud driver realistically possible
> though doesn't currently exist. I was really floored by their benchmark
> comparisons [2] and how much it was apples and oranges. I loved how they
> compare a 768MB/1CPU Vultr system for $5/month against a 3.75GB/2CPU AWS
> C3.Large that will run you around $78/month on-demand or between
> $29-54/month depending on reserved instance pricing or their 2GB/2CPU
> Vultr system for $20/month against the 3.75GB/1CPU AWS M3.Large with run
> costs abount $99/month on-demand and
> $39-71/month reserved instance. Comparing against an AWS T2 instance
> (nano 512MB/1CPU or micro 1GB/1CPU) would have seemed like better
> candidate for comparison against the 768MB Vultr and runs closer
> ($5/month t2.nano or $10/month t2.micro on-demand or $2-4/month t2.nano
> or $6-7/month t2.micro reserved instance). Likewise a t2.small or
> t2.medium would have been better comparisons for the 2GB Vultr. It
> looked like they went out of their way to pick the most expensive option
> to compare so their numbers looked better.  I found a blog [3] that
> seemed to give a better comparison in fact.
Slight disagreement, I believe the t2.* are terrible machines to
benchmark, given the cpu bursting budget. m3/4.mediums would have been
the better comparison, the Cs are a bit nuts w/ pricing.

How do you like libcloud? I've been meaning to check it out.
>
> Otherwise the pricing between DO and Vultr doesn't appear to really be
> all that difference comparing plans either. That said I may have to
> check out Vultr and see if I can't get the salt-cloud driver working.
> Cost being low enough I wouldn't mind throwing some money at it to get
> another cloud provider option made available to me. I like having the
> ability to launch and deploy my hosts to any SaltStack supported cloud
> provider for a DR/BC perspective and keeps me from being locked into any
> one provider. Then again I'm not worried about uploading custom ISO
> images and if I were I'd simply build and deploy those to AWS where I
> could easily make my own AMI offline and knowing how to work AWS to be
> cost comparative wouldn't bother me.
>
> 1. http://libcloud.readthedocs.org/en/latest/compute/drivers/vultr.html
> 2. https://www.vultr.com/benchmarks/
> 3. http://blog.due.io/2014/linode-digitalocean-and-vultr-comparison/
>