2

I am based in Europe and am considering using cloudControl as my cloud hosting platform. On the addons front, I would like to use IronWorker, IronMQ and Cloudant. Because of differences in usage metering, my preference would be to subscribe to Iron.io and Cloudant directly rather than as Addons, providing that I can connect cloudControl, the Iron.io services and Cloudant together properly.

I imagine that there won't be any administrative obstacle to this i.e. all these platforms will allow connecting one to the other if I purchase them separately and not as cloudControl addons (Is this correct?)

I am a bit confused though about the data centres that these different services use, as addons or as separates. I fear loosing data centre locality if I subscribe to these services as separates. In particular:

  • I understand cloudControl is hosted at AWS in Dublin.

  • Cloudant's European data centre is SoftLayer in Amsterdam. Is the Cloudant addon for cloudControl hosted there or is it deployed at AWS in Dublin especially for cloudControl? Am I going to lose out if I subscribe to Cloudant in Amsterdam?

  • What are Iron.io's data centre locations? I know that they are at AWS and Rackspace, but without further details I imagine that they are in the US. Again, are the addons for cloudControl hosted at AWS in Dublin especially for cloudControl? Can I subscribe to Iron.io and ask to have my workers and queues hosted in Dublin? Or else somewhere "close" to Cloudant's datacentre?

Eventually, is purchasing these services as separate a viable option?

Many thanks!

Jarrod Dixon
  • 15,727
  • 9
  • 60
  • 72
Nico
  • 31
  • 2

3 Answers3

3

From our side (cloudControl) there rule is that latency critical Add-ons have to be in Europe and optimally in the same EU-West AWS region when they leave beta status.

Usually you can always "buy" services directly and still use them in combination with our platform. The only difference is you won't get a consolidated invoice and cloudControl first level support mostly can't really answer questions regarding third party services not bought via the add-on market due to lack of information.

pst
  • 1,414
  • 11
  • 22
  • Thank you. Makes sense. Would you be able to confirm where the Cloudant add-on is hosted? Is it EU-West or Softlayer in Amsterdam? – Nico Nov 20 '12 at 10:01
  • I can confirm the shared Cluster for Cloudant is run in Amsterdam. For dedicated clusters they are able to run them in the Dublin datacenter too. – pst Nov 21 '12 at 14:53
2

As of this writing, IronMQ is hosted on aws-us-east and rackspace-dfw. IronWorker is hosted at aws-us-east.

We have plans for other zones and clouds but cannot provide a definitive timeline.

You can find information on cloud locations at the following pages in our dev center.

You can subscribe directly to Iron.io although we are grateful for all our platform partners. Should you have any questions, feel free to connect with us via our real-time chat room or our support channel.

frommww
  • 129
  • 4
  • Thank you, and thanks for the links. Could you confirm whether they are hosted in the same locations if purchased as cloudcontrol plugins? – Nico Nov 19 '12 at 09:33
  • Yes, the same currently applies if you purchase them as cloudControl addons, i.e. they won't run in Dublin. – Stefan Friesel Nov 19 '12 at 18:14
  • Thanks Stefan. So service locality is not something I would get with plugins either. I formed the (untested) view that US based workers + EU based database would be ok for some tasks, but that it would be too inefficient for data harvesting/processing workers (web crawler or feed consumer), but maybe I'm wrong. I guess I will have to run my own benchmarks in the end but, in the meanwhile, would anyone have any snap advice in favour or against running data lifting workers in this configuration? (I might create a separate questions for that). Thanks! – Nico Nov 20 '12 at 09:57
0

I am the OP. Interestingly, the answers from cloudControl and iron.io make me realise that I have been making a wrong assumption, which is that the cloudControl Addons had to be running "locally" on AWS EU-West. The fact that the iron.io and cloudant add-ons are running on separate data centres is something I didn't expect. Now that this is clear, it makes perfect sense that buying them separately or as add-on doesn't change their hosting location (and the argument for add-ons is indeed support and common billing).

I reckon it would make sense for PaaS in general to make clear whether their add-ons are running "locally" or not, for it is an important criterion of choice.

For now, IronWorker+Cloudant via cloudControl is probably not the ideal combination for data lifting workers in my app (they would be perfect if they were all in the same place!) so I'll host the workers differently.

Nico
  • 31
  • 2