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Keenan

AWS Status Update - Test Servers in AWS!

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Hello everyone!

 

The test servers are officially in AWS with the Test Client now pointing to them! I will be removing the "Test AWS" client later today.

 

I can already hear: "But wait, what about stress tests?"

Well, I had to do some upgrades to our Storm server which has been doing quintuple-duty as a build server, artifact server, and test server x3. After the upgrades the test server VMs became quite unstable. Since I was so close to being able to open up test in AWS, I figured to just forge through and fix the issues as they arise!

 

There will be periods of downtime as I still need to do some work here and there, but I'll likely just spin up another test server for me to brea.. add features to. That's the benefit of AWS!

 

So where does that leave us progress-wise? Well I needed to add something to the list - the store! Can't forget that...

 

  • Forums - DONE
  • Wurmpedia - DONE
  • WO Store - Not Started
  • WO Website - Not Started
  • WU Website - Not Started
  • Build Server - In development
  • Artifact Server - Not Started
  • Test Servers (3) - Live in AWS, tweaks to continue
  • Live Servers (14) - Tweaking and testing needed

 

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Great job Keenan, hopefully we'll see better performance and connectivity once the transition is finished.

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this is going to vastly decrease your server costs.  When I ported over the web site for my current work location to AWS, it lowered their monthly bill by the thousands...

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23 hours ago, jonsnow said:

this is going to vastly decrease your server costs.  When I ported over the web site for my current work location to AWS, it lowered their monthly bill by the thousands...

 

You can't compare websites with Wurm server applications.

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On 9/10/2019 at 6:35 PM, jonsnow said:

this is going to vastly decrease your server costs.  When I ported over the web site for my current work location to AWS, it lowered their monthly bill by the thousands...

 

Could be that your current work location just had a very expensive host for their web site. Where I work moving our stuff to AWS would actually increase our monthly bill.

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We are in a situation where some servers are more expensive and some are cheaper. The pricing will likely be a bit higher depending on if we do reserved pricing, but fairly balanced as we have the option of choosing instance sizes that best fit server needs.

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AWS is not that cheap as you would think.

Moving a project I work on to AWS would cost about 3-4 times more than running it on hetzner.

 

It all depends on how optimised your current server environment is, when it comes to Wurm a bigger root server on hetzner can handle multiple Wurm servers at once even if they are highly populated, which makes it a lot cheaper than on AWS.

 

AWS of course has a very good uptime and you can expect a stable environment even if you do nothing for years. A root server needs some care every now and then.

Edited by Sklo:D
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47 minutes ago, Sklo:D said:

AWS is not that cheap as you would think.

Moving a project I work on to AWS would cost about 3-4 times more than running it on hetzner.

 

It all depends on how optimised your current server environment is, when it comes to Wurm a bigger root server on hetzner can handle multiple Wurm servers at once even if they are highly populated, which makes it a lot cheaper than on AWS.

 

AWS of course has a very good uptime and you can expect a stable environment even if you do nothing for years. A root server needs some care every now and then.

 

I've done all the cost evaluations and presented them. :) I'm highly aware of the costs over Hetzner. With AWS, the savings is in reserved pricing. Reserved doesn't lock you in tightly either - there's room to scale if needed.

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May I weight in on something ? Although I'm biased, but anyway, please don't put your databases in docker. You're looking into disaster waiting to happen. Especially if you are running that ###### that's called MySQL :P

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no sane soul stores data in the container, that's what ext storage is for..

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The databases are stored in external storage.

Running Percona MySQL from a docker container that mounts that storage as a volume.

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With about 4 weeks past since last update, I'm wondering how things are going?

 

Is there any progress to report?

 

Thorin :)

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Especially after the servers have been shitting it so hard the last few days

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On 10/26/2019 at 3:40 PM, Thorinoakshield said:

With about 4 weeks past since last update, I'm wondering how things are going?

 

Is there any progress to report?

 

Thorin :)

 

Four weeks later and still nothing?

Does that mean we're have to start worrying or does it mean we've got to cheer?

 

Thorin :) 

PS: Yes I know self-quoting is sooooooooooooooooo 1968. :D

 

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Architecture work tends to be rather grueling especially if you intend to Do It Right, especially especially if you are working with something that wasn't built with heavy automation in mind. Spending a month without presentable result isn't reason to worry, though gifts of acetylsalicylic acid and alcohol would likely be appreciated. Hugs too, probably.

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Hi all.

 

After getting the test servers running in AWS, I turned my attention to our build servers. While doing so I identified several areas where security could be improved and have been working on that. I've also been struggling to find ways to export our current Jenkins pipeline into a format that can be safely committed to source control and imported back without issue. I'm tempted to forego this in the interest of furthering our on-boarding to AWS though. If anyone has had experience with Jenkins jobs in SCM, please feel free to comment! Finally, I've been doing more research into some best practices regarding managing the Wurm server containers. One thing that test has shown me is that my current set up is harder to manage than I'd like. While it's better than what we had before on the test side of things, it's still not where I want it to be for us to go live. I'd like to build monitoring and alerts into this infrastructure as well.

 

I look forward to testing the new infrastructure changes I've made in the coming weeks.

 

Thanks for the patience and happy Wurming!

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On 12/10/2019 at 6:21 PM, Lisimba said:

Nice to see an update, keep it up.

Agreed.

 

I'll keep quiet for the rest of the month now. 😉

 

Thorin 🙂

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This change can not come fast enough. Some US domestic players such as myself are having wholesale problems outside of using a VPN. 

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On 1/8/2020 at 4:02 PM, nygen said:

This change can not come fast enough. Some US domestic players such as myself are having wholesale problems outside of using a VPN. 

 

I have had the same problems, and unfortunately I've also had issues with the Frankfurt AWS zone. I think this issue is wider spread than just Hetzner this time.

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On 1/12/2020 at 3:54 AM, Keenan said:

 

I have had the same problems, and unfortunately I've also had issues with the Frankfurt AWS zone. I think this issue is wider spread than just Hetzner this time.

 

On 1/8/2020 at 10:02 PM, nygen said:

This change can not come fast enough. Some US domestic players such as myself are having wholesale problems outside of using a VPN. 

 

It is very important to stop selling AWS as the ultimate problem solver. There will just be a lot of upset people in the end. Hetzner is a very professional host and likely has the best price performance ratio in Europe. AWS will bring better uptimes because it is uses cloud instances and not dedicated hosts like the WO servers atm. It is not because Amazon is better than hetzner, there is a difference in technologies, which also comes at higher costs. On AWS Wurm will still have outages and network problems there is a lot going on on the internet and even Amazon relies on the internet. Another thing popping up now is data privacy which is known to be problematic on Amazon, just a single thought. In general not everything that glitters is gold.

Edited by Sklo:D

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1 hour ago, Sklo:D said:

 

 

It is very important to stop selling AWS as the ultimate problem solver. There will just be a lot of upset people in the end. Hetzner is a very professional host and likely has the best price performance ratio in Europe. AWS will bring better uptimes because it is uses cloud instances and not dedicated hosts like the WO servers atm. It is not because Amazon is better than hetzner, there is a difference in technologies, which also comes at higher costs. On AWS Wurm will still have outages and network problems there is a lot going on on the internet and even Amazon relies on the internet. Another thing popping up now is data privacy which is known to be problematic on Amazon, just a single thought. In general not everything that glitters is gold.

 

Data privacy is problematic on Amazon? Maybe for misconfigured systems... You're stepping into my professional wheelhouse here. I know all about AWS security, data privacy, etc. I'm responsible for ensuring PII is well-kept at work, which far exceeds what Wurm's data is. You can't attribute the debacles with Ring and what they do with Amazon's shopping front with AWS. They may be owned by the same person but they're entirely different organizations with AWS being vetted by regulators.

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Yeah you have a point about Internet traffic, but the idea that AWS is bad with data security isn’t backed up by any facts at all. Things like publicly accessible s3 buckets & security groups are intentional and ignorant settings configured by customers.

Edited by Chakron
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