Petteri Pyyny
14 Jan 2020 5:58
During the past 20 years AfterDawn has been hosted on a number of different platforms. From a shared Windows server to a cluster of HP servers running Linux on 100+ cores with half a terabyte of RAM.
Most of the time we've been running of leased, physical servers, that we have sized based on the requirements at the time, and foreseeable future. Having predictable costs with a predefined hardware platform has is pros, but also its cons. Leased servers often come with lengthy, often multi-years contracts, that don't scale well as the needs change over time. Not to mention the difficulty of handling operating system upgrades or hardware issues when running on a handful of servers.
Those times are now behind us, as AfterDawn found its new home with the world's fastest cloud provider, UpCloud. We have migrated from our legacy leased servers with spinning disks and rented switch to private cloud servers backed with blazingly fast MaxIOPS storage, and software-defined network (SDN).
The entire infrastructure is orchestrated with Terraform, and all services are deployed and managed by Ansible.
With UpCloud, we are able to run many smaller services on dedicated, $5/month servers, and both scale down and scale out both our database and web servers. This allows us to run a better, faster service at a fraction of the cost.