Another blogging restart
I’ve said it before – but hopefully there’s more to blog about again.
Less confidential stuff; lots more around Private Cloud and datacenter transformation.
.. the more things stay the same
Back to self hosting.
The blog has moved from home, to hosting at GoDaddy and up to Azure.
All had advantages – all had downsides. It’s the private cloud/public cloud conversation in a nutshell.
Ultimately GoDaddy performance let it down – especially for the database – was unacceptable. Their support was also pretty poor. As always “you get what you pay for” – but the bottlenecks for even simple, near static, WordPress sites were unacceptable.
Azure has a lot going for it – I am still keeping my eye on future features that are currently in beta. Performance was incredible; the process of getting apps updated was a little too cumbersome for me.
Self hosting really requires me to get dirty with the infrastructure and tuning – but the fact that I can lets me drive the performance. I’m also responsible for everything below the app – hardware, storage, network, connectivity, OS, security etc etc.
The more things change..
I just noted that Fedora 17 has just been released. That took me right back to when Red Hat Linux spewed out RHEL and Fedora Core about nine years ago.
I clearly remember the debates within the Ximian team about which distros to support in Red Carpet Enterprise 2.x and moving forward into the ZENworks Linux Management platforms.
WordPress on Azure
I have started looking at WordPress running on Azure – Microsoft’s public cloud app fabric. One area I am really interested in investigating is the performance and scalability of a PHP app – with particular reference to Gallery integration.
Notes and comments in the coming months.
Goodbye Netflix
Another step in cutting the cord – but this is a strange one.
We’ve been Netflix customers for over nine years – I signed up before we moved to Utah.
Last month I removed the streaming option and reverted back to just physical DVDs; today I cancelled the whole service.
At the end of the day – there’s just not a lot of stuff at Netflix that we want to watch any more.
Picking up the blogging again
Firstly – it’s been too long without posting here. Lots of reasons, lots of excuses – mainly workload and not having anything public to blog about.
Secondly – I’ve changes roles inside Microsoft – moving from Business Development (where nothing is public or bloggable) and into customer facing enterprise strategy.
The role is a great fit – and it takes me back to what I love – working and interacting directly with customers.
I’ll write more about the role and the experience in the next few days.
Embedding video in blogs
Another in an occasional series – collating my notes on blogging and infrastructure that I’ve sent to my customers.
This time discussing the fun of getting video embedded into your blog.
Background
The original conversation was when I was self hosting. Dropping a video into the blog was easy – the issues were really around performance (slow uplink) and impact to other services (such as VOIP). Being given a denial-of-service from your own infrastructure wasn’t a good plan. Every time a video was viewed the uplink was hosed – and services were down.
The variables
Performance. What is the user experience pulling down a video. What if they are in Seattle, New York, New Zealand, London, Berlin? Is there any streaming or does the whole video need to download?
Privacy. Really about access control – and how to stop private family videos getting leached or viewed.
Ease of use. Facebook is a great example of what people (consumers) expect. Shoot video on phone, link to a blog/email, click done. All of the magic (rendering, transcoding, codec mungling, upload, CDN placement) is done behind the scenes.
Cost. Free is fantastic – but the elasticity of the above requirements changes that somewhat. For most of my blogging and video posting I’ve tended to rank:
- Ease of use
- Privacy
- Cost
- Performance
Somewhere in that mix is an immutable value that the cost cannot exceed ($5 per month? $10? $50 seems too much) – it should be ‘an affordable luxury’ as my friend Steffi put it.
The experiments
Self-hosting. Posting MPGs and serving them via Apache.
- Ease of use – not great. Getting video to the blog was not a problem (ftp or xml-rpc) but embedding it was pretty crappy.
- Privacy – good. Same authentication as the blog and photos.
- Cost – fantastic. No additional expense.
- Performance – very poor. Slow to serve, degraded service at home – all round a no go.
Amazon S3. Posting MPGs to S3
- Ease of use – ouch. Much harder than self-host – I couldn’t see myself explaining to customers about S3 buckets, upload, setting security and finally embedding into a blog.
- Privacy – medium. Security by obscurity.
- Cost – good. Low cost to upload and store. Low cost to serve from S3.
- Performance. Better than self host. European S3 buckets worked well for non-US visitors. Poor experience all round for non-US and non-EU visitors. US-only content was pretty slow for EU viewers – but better than self-host.
Post to shared hosting server. Post MPGs to shared blog.
Much the hybrid between the above two. Benefits to performance.
Video hosting service – YouTube
- Ease of use – easy. Upload, click, done. Good plugins for embed to blog.
- Privacy – poor. Private video – requires YouTube/Google login to view; share to 50 contacts. Or unlisted – which is leachable. Security by obscurity.
- Cost – fantastic. Zero.
- Performance – good. Fast and widely available. Good mobile support.
Video streaming/hosting service – Bits on the Run
- Ease of use – easy. Upload, click, done. Good plugin for embed.
- Privacy – medium. Security by obscurity – but less obvious than YouTube. Also can be protected by preventing download/leach.
- Cost – medium. Storage and egress costs.
- Performance – good. Uses Cloudfront CDN (soon to change??) which has global distribution – works well across the US, Europe and AP.
After hacking around with all of the options I decided to use Bits on the Run for hosting and streaming videos. I’ve been really happy to date. It’s costing me around $10 per month.
The conversation
Here’s the first mail – some slight changes – but the main tradeoffs are in there.
So what to look for:
– Performance
– Storage and bandwidth costs
It’s also a lot better experience for your various viewers. The video content is pushed out to a global content delivery network – see map below – so no matter whether you’re in Munchen or Sydney – you’ll get a smooth, fast video.
It’s all about your tradeoffs:
– Privacy (none with youtube)
– Speed (can you watch it without a painful wait)
– Technology (do you need a phd to get the video edited, uploaded, converted to the right format, put into the blog
– Cost
It’s the usual elastic maths – I ended up using a video streaming service because it really makes the speed and technology easy (upload and it’s done) and it integrates with the blog (easy) – but it comes at a price.
Then the follow up
The challenges of getting video securely into your blog were numerous:
– performance (slow, stop/start video, poor playback)
– technically hard
– getting the video into a format that was useful to play on the web
I’ve been testing out a video-on-demand service that seems to fix these issues. All you need to do is have your video ready to upload in AVI or MP4 format, upload it – then embed it into your blog. It should be that simple. All of the technical gubbins behind the scenes is looked after – along with getting the video to the right place on the web.
Bits on the run is a pay service that does all of this – and it’s reasonably priced. Notice that it’s not FREE. Depending on how many people download your videos – you might have some surprises. On the positive side it does let you control quite carefully the security (i.e. it’s not on YouTube with a kabazillion people able to watch your family) and it moves the videos to a close point on the web for viewers. Tie that into the web-site/blog security that’s already in place – and it’s pretty good all round.
Here are the points around the globe where videos are stored. This means that people in the US, Europe, Japan and Aus/NZ can view the videos with good performance.
“Snowpocalypse”
Tsk. Snow is forecast for mid-week – and the local media are going insane over the possibilities of between 3” and 12” (7cm and 30cm) of snow.
Here’s the forecast:
Cliff Mass has some reasoned discussion on his NW Weather Blog.
Updates from “Snowpocalypse central” during the week.
Killing boxes
I’ve got rid of five more servers out of the rack this weekend.
Web server – this was a nice fat server for virtualisation; now repurposed with a nice video card and it’s a media server for the home theatre.
Old media server is now dead. So long!
Old MP3/itunes/TVersity server is now consolidated with the new media server – the last Windows 2003 box is now gone! So long!
I also managed to decommission the old management server – the originally was running ZCM10 (natch) then ConfigManager then SCE. That’s all managed from the cloud – so that box is dead – along with the SQL server that was next to it. So long!
I’ll take a pic of the empty rack. It’s got two UPS, the archive server and the firewall – that’s it. Looks pretty lonely.
The end of an era – no more self-host
After a decade of static IP and reasonable bandwidth I finally ended my ‘experiment’ and ‘learning lab’ which was self-hosting.
Before we moved to the US I ran NetWare 5.1 from my WW2-era bomb shelter under my house in Nottingham. This was the home for my email (running NIMS – subsquently NetMail) and a semi-static list of resources, links and thoughts.
After the move to the US the server went through NetWare 6.5 and then on to Red Hat Linux 7, then to SLES 8. SLES 8 served as an admirable photo and notepad written blog platform for when kid #1 appeared in mid 2003. The handwritten weblog soon evolved to blogger.
In early 2005 the number of photos and the number of blog updates grew too large – and a multiple update to SLES 9 and WordPress was called for. NetMail moved from Red Hat to Windows Server and then on to SLES 10 (at the time showing little innovation, shortly after sold off) up to Google Apps.
The final incarnation of the blog server was running SLES 11 SP1 on top of Hyper-V/Windows Server 2008 R2. Still running WordPress and all of the various addons.
The server is now offline; the VM backed up – it’s going to be rebuilt as a media server.
The blogs and photos are all now hosted up on GoDaddy – and mail is hosted Exchange.
It’s been a great learning lab – firewalls, hosting, Apache, MySQL; it’s given me some great experience with change control and planning – and sometimes things just went wrong.
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