After having good experiences here with my personal sites, I'm thinking about deploying here for a new larger site I'm working on. Other alternatives are EC2, Rackspace cloud, or perhaps Heroku (plus a couple of EC2 servers for stuff I can't run on Heroku).

The new managed load balancing service here is music to my ears!

Anyway. I want the ability to spin up an extra node quickly when I need to, with a predetermined image (selected from a short list of images I would maintain - e.g. front-end web server, database mirror server, back-end job server etc).

In thinking about how to do this here at Linode, two thoughts came to mind:

1. Have some stackscripts for my different setups, and use those to spin up new nodes. Downside is I think these scripts could take a while to run - for example, installing LAMP + ruby + passenger + whatever else wouldn't all happen in a matter of minutes. Ideally I'd like the flexibility to have a new node up and running within 5 minutes or so, so I'm thinking this probably isn't the way to go.

2. Have a "clone server" node in the Linode manager that basically just holds disk images for each server type. I wouldn't be using this server; I'd just use it as a clone destination (when saving the clones) or a clone source (when spinning up new nodes). So this would have say 5 different disk images attached.

Any thoughts on that? Is there a better way to accomplish #2?

Actually, don't immediately discount option #1. It is faster than you'd think to install a bunch of packages and spray configuration templates across the filesystem. It is more work up front, since you not only have to have a working configuration but you also have to write code to reproduce it, but it requires a hell of a lot less space and leverages the existing Linode master images.

If you want to go this route, take a look at Chef or Puppet too.

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I have a "clean" image that I keep around that has a few things that I need to get started. I can clone the disk to another Linode relatively easily and be up and running in ~15 minutes. The only down side to this is that I can't use the full amount of disk space on one of my 'nodes For one image it works alright, but if you plan on having multiple images I'd seriously take a look at creating StackScripts or storing your images on your local machine and copying them over as you need them.

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Thanks for the ideas, guys. I'll try some of these things and see how it goes...if I come to any interesting conclusions I'll post back here!

I've run some tests, and here is what I found.

The image I was building included starting with a fresh Ubuntu 10.10, installing updates, installing and configuring apache2, install build tools, building ruby from source, and installing and configuring bundler, passenger, and rails. Then deploying my app using capistrano.

I didn't use stackscripts yet, as it wasn't clear how to run those from a different user than root...so I basically just logged in, created a new user, logged in as that new user, and ran my scripts.

So for the script:

5:23 start boot, set up user
5:25 start main_setup.sh script
5:36 start capistrano deployment
5:38 app deployed and operational

So about 16 minutes start to finish. The bulk of the time is spent compiling ruby, pretty much pegged at 100% of one CPU.

I then saved the above image, and cloned it to a new node. The clone process:

6:06 start clone process for 4GB image
6:09 booted, hostname reconfigured, start capistrano deployment
6:11 app deployed and operational

So about 5 minutes start to finish to clone to a new node.

Note that I sized the disk image to only 4GB - if it was larger, as it might well need to be in production, the clone would take longer. Or I could clone a smaller image, then resize it larger prior to boot on the destination - I didn't try that.

Anyway, just wanted to post back here in case anyone else was wondering about this kind of thing!

Stack scripts are run automatically on the building of a linode as the root user, if you wanted to run them as another use you can use sudo inside a script to execute the commands. However you're probably going to want to run as root anyway since installing software etc requires it.

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for the first option, you can try:

* speedup your ruby compile, with extra options for make like -j4 (4 compiles at the same time, ideal for the 4 cores linode)
* produce an already ruby binary install, try to produce a rpm/deb/tbz2/etc for your distro and deploy this

for the second option, maybe you can rsync your filesystem, instead of clone the disk, to rsync to a full disk.

Mmm...good thoughts; I'll have to look at what the makefile actually does and see if I can make something like -j4 work.

I've also thought about using rvm instead of building from source; somehow it just feels wrong to use rvm on a production server, but maybe I can get over that...