Hey HN, thanks for all the love on this, and for helping me think about other use cases for and how to communicate about this product. I really appreciate this!
Also, I noticed I spent a lot of time maintaining the demo instances (resizing). In a real deployment the number of users per machine is pretty much static, but here I've had to deal with scaling and spikes.
It occurred to me today that I could probably put the free demos behind a load balancer (smaller basic machines, and scale them up or down), so that I don't have to manually resize the instance.
I've taken down the two demo sites (free & hk) for now, while I work on the load balancer setup. Should be back up in a couple hours.
I have not worked out how to geographically load balance both of those from a single domain based on which you are closest too, but I want to see if these new smaller instances in load balanced target group pools can scale to take the load like a larger instance.
The load balancing setup I used today has issues, which you can see if you're using it now (very slow).
Namely, load balancing and scaling based on CPU is not a good metric, because new instances (which are still serving multiple users), will keep absorbing new users before the metric is triggered, and even when it is triggered, a new instance will take a while to spin up and build some browsers, so scaling lags too far behind load and the effect is existing instances get and stay overloaded.
So, I have an idea for a new autoscaling system that puts 1 tiny machine per user, but it will take some reconfiguring. So, in the meantime, I'm switching back to the old system (massive instances, vertical scale).
I'll do that now and the servers should switch to the new system in about 30 mins.
Also, I noticed I spent a lot of time maintaining the demo instances (resizing). In a real deployment the number of users per machine is pretty much static, but here I've had to deal with scaling and spikes.
It occurred to me today that I could probably put the free demos behind a load balancer (smaller basic machines, and scale them up or down), so that I don't have to manually resize the instance.
I've taken down the two demo sites (free & hk) for now, while I work on the load balancer setup. Should be back up in a couple hours.