Surviving the Cloud: Why Single-Vendor Strategies Are Suicide

If you are reading this, you probably spent last month cleaning up the mess from the latest US-East outage. The "cloud" promised us 100% uptime, but the reality of 2014 is that the cloud is just someone else's computer—and sometimes, that computer loses power, gets seized by a three-letter agency, or simply suffers from "noisy neighbor" syndrome.

As a Systems Architect operating out of Oslo, I have seen too many CTOs blindly sign contracts with American giants, only to panic when the latency to Virginia hits 120ms or when the Datatilsynet (Norwegian Data Protection Authority) starts asking where exactly that customer data is physically stored. The era of "put it all on AWS" is ending. We need a strategy that prioritizes Data Sovereignty, raw I/O performance, and actual redundancy.

The Latency Lie and the IOPS Trap

Let’s talk about the two things that kill application performance: Network Latency and Disk I/O. Marketing brochures love to talk about "infinite scalability," but they rarely mention the cost of network-attached storage.

When you provision a standard instance on a massive public cloud, your disk is often a network volume. It’s convenient, sure. But when you are trying to push 5,000 transactions per second on a Magento store or a high-traffic MySQL cluster, that network hop kills you. I recently benchmarked a standard "Cloud SSD" against a local RAID-10 array. The results were embarrassing for the cloud giant.

If you care about performance, you need Direct Attached Storage. This is where the industry is heading. We are seeing a shift toward PCIe-based flash storage (often referred to as NVMe in the kernel logs since Linux 3.3). This isn't just "fast"; it's instant. While most providers are still upselling you on SATA SSDs, specialized Nordic hosts like CoolVDS are already deploying these PCIe/NVMe reliable instances. The difference isn't 10%; it's 10x.

Pro Tip: Check your disk scheduler if you are running on SSDs. The default CFQ scheduler is optimized for spinning platters. Switch to NOOP or DEADLINE for flash storage.

# Check current scheduler
cat /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler

# Switch to noop on the fly
echo noop > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler

The "Hybrid-Redundant" Architecture

You don't need to abandon the public cloud, but you must stop treating it as your only basket. The most robust architecture I’ve deployed this year involves a "Core + Burst" strategy.

1. The Core (Norway)

Your database and primary application logic live on a high-performance VPS in Norway. Why? Three reasons:

• Latency: A ping from Oslo to a CoolVDS instance at the NIX (Norwegian Internet Exchange) is under 2ms. To Frankfurt? 30ms. To US-East? 100ms+. For a dynamic PHP or Ruby application, that round-trip time adds up to seconds of page load delay.
• Privacy: Under the Personopplysningsloven (Personal Data Act), you are responsible for your users' data. Keeping it on Norwegian soil simplifies compliance with the Datatilsynet and keeps you out of the PR nightmare of the NSA scandals.
• Performance: Dedicated resources. No "stolen CPU cycles" from other tenants.

2. The Burst (Global)

Use a CDN or a cheap US-based VPS solely for serving static assets (images, CSS, JS) or as a failover load balancer.

Configuration: The HAProxy Glue

How do we stitch this together? HAProxy. It is rock solid and handles tens of thousands of connections with barely any RAM usage. Here is a battle-hardened config snippet I use to prioritize local traffic while keeping a failover ready:

global
    log 127.0.0.1 local0
    maxconn 4096
    user haproxy
    group haproxy
    daemon

defaults
    log     global
    mode    http
    option  httplog
    option  dontlognull
    retries 3
    option  redispatch
    timeout connect 5000
    timeout client  50000
    timeout server  50000

frontend http_front
    bind *:80
    acl url_static path_end .jpg .gif .png .css .js
    use_backend static_servers if url_static
    default_backend app_servers

backend app_servers
    balance roundrobin
    # Primary CoolVDS Node (High weight)
    server app_oslo 10.0.0.1:80 check weight 100
    # Fallback/Overflow Node (Low weight)
    server app_backup 192.168.1.5:80 check weight 10 backup

This configuration ensures that 100% of your traffic hits your high-speed Oslo server (CoolVDS) by default. The backup node only engages if the primary goes dark. It’s simple, effective, and sleeps better than a complex DNS failover setup.

Optimizing MySQL for the Hardware

If you are smart enough to run on CoolVDS’s NVMe/PCIe storage, you need to tell MySQL it has room to breathe. The default my.cnf is written for spinning rust drives from 2005.

Change these settings immediately:

[mysqld]
# Use up to 70% of your RAM for the pool
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 4G

# SSD Optimization: Disable neighbor flushing
innodb_flush_neighbors = 0

# Increase I/O capacity for high-speed Flash/NVMe
innodb_io_capacity = 2000
innodb_io_capacity_max = 4000

# Ensure durability (ACID) but rely on the RAID controller
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 1

The Verdict: Own Your Infrastructure

Virtualization technology like KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) has matured to the point where the overhead is negligible. There is no excuse for suffering through the noisy neighbor problems of container-based hosting or the opaque pricing models of the mega-clouds.

In 2014, your competitive advantage is speed and trust. A latency of 150ms is a lost customer. A data breach due to foreign surveillance is a lost business.

Build your core in Norway. Optimize for the hardware. And if you want to see what your database feels like when it’s not being strangled by network storage, spin up a test instance on CoolVDS. The provision time is about 55 seconds—barely enough time to grab a coffee, but enough time to change your infrastructure strategy forever.