nixCraft: Linux Tips, Hacks, Tutorials, And Ideas In Blog Format » Cloud Computing

Amazon AWS Route 53 GEO DNS Configurations

nixCraft — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 07:42:31 +0000

You can send visitors to different servers based on country of their IP address using Amazon Route 53 cloud based dns server. For example, if you have a server in Amsterdam, a server in America, and a server in Singapore, then you can easily route traffic for visitors in Europe to the Amsterdam server, people in Asia go to the Singapore server and those in the rest of the world be served by the American server. This will results into the various kinds of benefits such as:

Better performance as you are sending web site visitors to their nearest web server.
Reduced load on origin.
Geomarketing/online advertising.
Restricting content to those geolocated in specific countries (I am not a big fan of DRM).
In some cases you can get potentially lower costs and more.

In this post, I will explain how to configure and test GeoDNS using AWS Route 53 service.

Amazon Cloudfront Dynamic Content Delivery With A WordPress Blog

nixCraft — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 20:13:59 +0000

A typical Wordpress blog contains a mix of static stuff such as images, javascript, style sheets and dynamic content such as posts, pages and comments posted by users. You can speed up your blog by serving static content via content delivery network such as Akamai, Edgecast and so on. The big boys of CDN business also offered the solution to accelerate dynamic content to improve the performance and reliability of the blog. However, solutions offered by big and traditional CDNs are expensive. Amazon cloudfront recently started to serving dynamic content at lowered price. In this blog post, I will explain:

How to serve your entire blog using cloudfront.
DNS settings.
Wordpress settings.
Documenting limitations of cloudfront.
Documenting performance improvements.

Testing HTTP Status: 206 Partial Content and Range Requests

nixCraft — Sat, 17 Nov 2012 12:18:42 +0000

The HTTP 2xx class of status codes indicates the action requested by the client was received, and processed successfully. HTTP/1.1 200 OK is the standard response for successful HTTP requests. When you type www.cyberciti.biz in the browser you will get this status code. The HTTP/1.1 206 status code allows the client to grab only part of the resource by sending a range header. This is useful for:

Understanding http headers and protocol.
Troubleshooting network problems.
Troubleshooting large download problems.
Troubleshooting CDN and origin HTTP server problems.
Test resuming interrupted downloads using tools like lftp or wget or telnet.
Test and split a large file size into multiple simultaneous streams i.e. download a large file in parts.

Amazon Glacier: Cloud Storage For Archives And Backups Launched

nixCraft — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 11:04:54 +0000

Amazon web services (AWS) launched a new service called Amazon Glacier. You can use this service for archiving mission-critical data and backups in a reliable way in an enterprise IT or for personal usage. This service cost as low as $0.01 (one US penny, one one-hundredth of a dollar) per Gigabyte, per month. You can store a lot of data in various geographically distinct facilities and verifying hardware or data integrity, irrespective of the length of your retention periods. The first thing comes to mind is, the Glacier would be a good place for a backup off family photos and videos from my local 12TB nas.

Amazon Announces SSD Storage Based High I/O EC2 Server / Instance

nixCraft — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 12:03:06 +0000

Excellent news. This may come handy. In our data center we have a few servers for just two applications. These applications are just run for 2 or 3 days a month and then the rest of the time all servers in rack just sit idle. It is a waste of servers, time, energy and resources. This is a good use-cases for on-demand high I/O server(s), where I need low-latency and are an exceptionally good host for NoSQL databases such as MongoDB.