The Pantheon Project Blazes Ahead
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There is something just awesome about using a Drupal site hosted with Pantheon. Snappy page loads will make you happy, and when your pages generate up to ten times faster you will really feel the difference. Even though it makes Josh nervous (since we're still in beta testing) it has been really fun for us to play with the first Pantheon powered sites out in the wild. In all we have tracked over 1,000 Pantheon servers launch so far during the beta test phase of the Mercury stack.
We're getting very close to a stable 1.0 release for the Mercury Stack. So far, the biggest feedback we have heard from testers was that A) The stack needed to be able to run everywhere, not just on Amazon EC2, and B) Once a server was launched, improvements and changes to Mercury needed to be portable to live environments.
To address B, we recently added support to Mercury for BCFG2, a server configuration management system. Thanks to the magic of BCFG2, all changes to the Mercury stack (managed in a BZR source code repository) can be easily pushed to live Mercury servers. This provides the best of both worlds, all the power of the Mercury stack available to those that need the flexibility of managing their own server. Those wanting to roll their own can branch a config-set from our public launchpad repository right now.
To address A, we have a lot of exciting announcements in store soon, but first..
New Pantheon Website
Say hello to the new Pantheon website designed by our own Nica Lorber. Click around, and you'll soon discover our big announcement...
Announcing the Mercury on Demand Service
Soon, we will be offering a Mercury on Demand hosting service built on top of the Rackspace Cloud! We will begin private beta testing with our first customers later this month.
Our first hosting package will be comparable to Slicehost, Linode, and other VPS providers in terms of service and cost, but with one big difference -- our server environments, available at the click of a button, will come set up with the full Mercury stack capable of running Drupal 200+ times faster.
Also, we're excited to leverage the wonderful libcloud project in offering our on-demand service. This powerful open-source python library allows us to use a single interface to talk to a growing list of cloud hosts, meaning we'll be able to utilize other clouds in subsequent service offerings going forward.
If you are interested in being part of our private beta program please sign up here. Otherwise, stay tuned, there will be more announcements shortly.
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This sounds very exciting, and seems to fill a gap in the hosting ecosphere!
Hi Zack,
I was very excited while reading your post but after considering the price vs the same package on rackspace cloud I'm wondering where is the value added ?
Sure it's just a little more expensive than Linode and Slicehost but it's twice the price of setting up an instance on Rackspace's cloud.
AMI are supposed to be "very easy to deploy" (I haven't tried it yet hence the quotes) so will you provide some features/services ?
I'm disposed to pay a much bigger price for say a managed service or a little more (10-20%) if it's way easier to deploy and setup an AMI.
And how will the price grow if I want to get a bigger instance (say 1G vs 512M) ?
Thanks a lot for this service and I'm looking forward the beta and new announcements.
I was very excited while reading your post but after considering the price vs the same package on rackspace cloud I'm wondering where is the value added
The value is that you don't have to deal with setting up a Rackspace account, and that you get what is effectively a normal VPS (RackSpace's product is the same as SliceHost) pre-configured to run Drupal in the Mercury stack, rather than stock Ubuntu without even Apache installed. You'll also be set to get updates to that stack going forward.
Plus, you'll be working with a hosting entity that is focused on Drupal. There will be the usual niceties like monitoring, but also possibly some tools around site import, Drupal-specific stats, etc. Going forward, we'll be looking to integrate more service offerings into the on-demand product (think CDN, version control, continuous integration, performance testing, etc).
The stack is, of course, free and open-source. If you are capable of setting it up yourself (or you have more time than money and are good at reading/executing documentation) you can go directly to RackSpace or any host, roll your own, and almost certainly save $10 or $20 bucks a month. We encourage this, as it's an excellent way to drive overall innovation, and we know of lots of users and organizations that are willing and able to adopt a more DIY approach in order to keep costs down.
Our on-demand service is intended for those are looking to get up and running quickly on a stack that's been completely vetted, and who will appreciate the extra services that come with hosting on a Drupal-centric platform.
And how will the price grow if I want to get a bigger instance (say 1G vs 512M)?
In terms of up-sizing instances, while we're still figuring out technical details we intend to offer this kind of "grow your server" option. There are some complecations here because even Clouds have resource constraints at a certain point, but we are pretty sure we can work it out.
Full pricing details will be released soon, but expect the costs to track existing VPS providers pretty closely.
Thanks a lot for these answer Josh. I definitely watt to try the stack and the possibility to fire an instance on Rackspace for a few days without any commitment is tempting but you're definitely right, it isn't so easy and time is a scarce ressource.
So at the end, I may try it a little for the sake of knowledge but you're right, better trust pros like you than try to manage this by myself.
Also monitoring, version control, backups... are very interesting.
I'll definitely check it out.
Bests
PS: I suppose I'll have a full access so I'll be able to host non drupal site ?
We'll need to see about how we can offer "demo" access. That currently isn't something we have planned, but I can see the value of a "try before you buy" options.
In terms of access, yes, like with and VPS you get root! The box is yours to run however you see fit.
The numbers look impressive, as does the feature set (I had never heard of BCFG2, but it sounds very cool and tremendously helpful). I noticed the use of libcloud, which allows you to use any cloud hosting. But what about CDN integration?
I'm the developer of the CDN integration module and of the accompanying File Conveyor daemon. File Conveyor allows you to use push CDNs such as Amazon CloudFront transparently: it manages the detection of new/changed/deleted files for you and syncs them. It even supports processing of files before they are synced (e.g. lossless image optimization, CSS minification through YUI Compressor, JS minification through Google Closure Compiler, etc.).
CDN integration would offer another speed improvement in page loading performance on top of all other optimizations Pantheon ships with.
Let me know if you're interested in bundling this with Pantheon. I'd be happy to help!
CDN is definitely on the radar. One issue is getting the necessary patches into Pressflow, and another is how to bundle this so that it's effortless to implement.
Currently we are talking with some other hosting providers who have integrated CDN systems that would allow us to offer a Premium configuration all set to scream on a big Global IP network, and we'll need to review the full range of options out there — suggestions welcome! — but the important thing for me is to make sure this is a seamless, bulletproof and doesn't require complicated configuration from our customers.
People are of course free to roll their own CDN implementation on top of our stack now, whether they're using the on-demand service or have their own hosting setup. Just apply the patches, sign up for a CDN, implement the daemon, and go. :)
For some, that list of tasks sounds easy; for others, it is effectively impossible. We're looking to serve the latter market with solid turnkey solutions.
In terms of help, that's great to hear, and we'll be in touch. More expertise and innovation means better Drupal for all!
I would definitely pay an extra 10.00 or 20.00 per month for a turnkey solution.
I'm a little unclear about what is being offered, are we talking about a metered per instance solution like EC2 or a flat rate with the ability to run multiple AMI's per account?
The ability to run a dev, alpha and production site, and spin up new AMI's as needed per account would make this offering a slam dunk.
I'd also like to see the ability to export and import the AMI's back and forth from VMware fusion.
To clarify: we're making AMIs and other free images publicly available. How you use them is up to you. :)
The initial on-demand service will behave like a normal VPS. It's backed by the RackSpace cloud, but to our customers it will be just like getting a Slicehost.
The stuff you're talking about in terms of dev/staging/prod environments and import/export to other services is definitely where all this is headed. But we've still gotta crawl before we walk.
Hey Zack and Josh,
Very exciting news... I'm definitely intrigued with the news services you'll be providing.
One service I'd love to see is a turnkey solution for a high availability cluster. My ideal configuration would include:
* 1 Varnish Server
* 2 MySQL Servers (1 master + 1 slave)
* 2 Apache Web Servers (with auto load balancing)
* 1 NFS File Server (Or a better alternative to share files?)
* 1 Apache Solr Server
* 1 Mail Server (but aren't there spam problems with email servers in the cloud?)
Any work being done on this front? Any plans to incorporate high availability into your new offerings?
Thanks!
Cheers,
Ben
Turnkey clusters are totally exciting, but also relatively complex. We've been talking to some hosting partners about the possibilities here, but we felt our energies were better focused on first delivering the simple use-cases for the broad audience.
However, there are a lot of cases (ecommerce being the most obvious) where high-availability is a must-have. I don't doubt we'll get there. :)
Congratulations, it's great to see the progress on this and that you're now using BCFG2! It will be interesting to organize the configuration in a way that let's you setup one heavy duty server with all the key apps/services running or decide to have them all separated on different servers. I'm not too familiar with BCFG2 yet so maybe you already have everything setup that way.
Thanks for sharing and keep up the good work!
wonder if beta testing is still available...