[Info-vax] How would you load balance excess webserver traffic between multiple OpenVMS servers?

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2021-01-13 13:22:53 +0000, Simon Clubley said:

> On 2021-01-12, Jan-Erik Söderholm <jan-erik.soderholm at telia.com> wrote:
>> 
>> You will not get any ransomeware attacks (not any successfull ones at 
>> least) on your VMS servers.
> 
> What on earth makes you say that ???

There's also that hosting a high-profile and controversial web site—a 
site such as Parler, for instance—makes any platform into a target. 
Even if the site is not breached—which is a questionable starting 
position particularly for a high-profile and controversial site—a 
self-hosted site can be targeted for ransom with a DDoS. Few outside 
CDNs and DDoS providers and government-scale entities will have the 
available and distributed network bandwidth to continue operations 
during a DDoS. Krebs was hit with 363 GBps sustained several years ago, 
and I'd expect larger are now possible. And a self-hosted site that 
gets DDoS'd also means self-hosted mail and other local activities are 
all offline, too. DDoS ransoms happen. Even if the host itself is not 
breached, which is what Jan-Erik is assuming. (Not everybody can 
redirect their DNS records to Mossad during a DDoS. Yes, that's 
happened.)

As for the general configuration and general question.... I suspect 
this'll all end when Bob gets quoted a price somewhere above USD$50K 
for a couple of hosts and for clustering, and as the envisioned cluster 
config won't be robust as two-host clusters as clusters absent quorum 
disk are primary-secondary only. One similar config was USD$60K for a 
pair of low-end Alpha boxes, clustered.

With newer (not new) Itanium server hardware, and with more storage and 
storage and I/O hardware for redundancy and backups and other sundry 
parts, USD$100K wouldn't surprise.

And that configuration was pre-SaaS licensing, so there'll be ongoing 
support payments with the new configurations. The new OpenVMS product 
licenses have termination dates.

And if Rdb is the preferred database behind that hilarious database 
configuration, well, I haven't seen a quote for that recently, but the 
quotes I have seen for Rdb have generally been prodigious.

And that's before we discuss the costs and effort involved in 
configuring and deploying and maintaining the software involved. 
Various of which will have to be locally developed, usually including 
maintenance, security and auditing, backups, and other such scripting.

TL;DR: interest in most of these OpenVMS new-cluster projects seem to 
evaporate around the time the quotes are received. Whether these folks 
end up remaining on AWS or other hosting, or pay for local Windows or 
Linux or BSD or OpenVMS or otherwise, on local hardware? An 
organization involved with legitimate activities and not otherwise 
threatening to bomb Amazon data centers or ilk is not at risk of 
getting kicked off AWS. If allegations of treasons or criminal 
activities potentially arise as part of your business plan, yes, y'all 
will probably want to host elsewhere, and else-domain.


ps: When self-hosting "everything", don't assume that locally-hosted 
mail will arrive at the destination. Various (big) providers will 
simply drop arriving mail from low-reputation or no-reputation mail 
servers, and whether configured with DANE, SPF, DKIM and DMARC, or 
otherwise.


-- 
Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC