Build from existing images
One of the annoying things about cloud66 is that you have to wait upwards of 30 minutes just to spin up a new web server because it has to reconfigure and build all of the dependencies. Why not save an image of the current web server at the provider and start the build with it? This would save a ton of time in scaling up new servers.
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AdminCloud 66 (Admin, Cloud 66) commented
Good point. There are some points to note:
- Updating our images on the cloud vendors that support shared images (like AWS). This usually speed things up and is done regularly. We just performed one on AWS.
- Not all cloud vendors support taking images - public or private (like Telefonica or Joyent).
- Most cloud vendors (AWS included) will have shut the box down to take an image if you require data consistency. This would either make the first build much slower (shutdown, cut the image, start and adjust the new IPs), or will require a shutdown of a server sometime during its life (most likely the first server in a cluster, which would result in a downtime).
To achieve the ultimate goal of speeding up deployments and scaling we are working on a solution that is based on spending little time on the VM and more on the containers that are pre-built. That way we will be decoupled from the vendor limitations and restart requirement.
Hope this makes sense. We are improving the system constantly at a high speed. I hope it will be satisfactory when it's ready!