Hi everyone, Matt from SkySilk here! (apologies for the long post, please bear with me, I promise future responses will be shorter) I wanted to make sure everyone’s comments are addressed…I’ll post a TLDR and then the expanded response below.
@aaronstuder thanks for checking us out and sharing our link here! We take all user feedback to heart and enjoy seeing what people have to say about our new platform.
@scottalanmiller Thanks for your feedback, glad you enjoy the option to choose your own processor!
TLDR;
At this time we only offer LXC containers for better machine performance, we have a whole host of different features and products in the works.
Please contact me if you would like to get a trial account to run some benchmarks I will be more than happy to assist.
openSUSE - This distro was the least popular out of all templates provided during our beta, so as you can imagine it’s not at the top of our list. Over 20,000 VPS spun off and this template was less than 1%. That said we like feedback and will try to facilitate individual requests whenever possible.
Ceph is way more robust than using a Raid10 in a larger environment (in our experience), which is why we’ve opted to go that route.
While a true OS re-install doesn't exist yet (we're working on it), you can workaround that by immediately taking a snapshot after deploying and using that as a way to reset your VPS to a clean state if you don't want to delete/re-deploy.
Expanded Response:
True, we only offer OpenSuse Leap and it is two versions old - we have decided to focus on the crowd favorites (or at least based on the feedback from our beta users) which have been Ubuntu and CentOS. We are working hard towards providing a wider range of distros to choose from, as well as turn-key and custom applications. That said, we do appreciate feedback and can prioritize certain distros if anyone makes a request.
I am glad that you noticed we use Ceph in lieu of RAID. We use Ceph for our clustered storage backend with a triple replicated RBD pool. Unlike RAID, this means your block storage device is online even if a node falls down (or gets shot by the other nodes[1]). While the performance may not be the same as RAID10, we feel that data safety and high-availability take precedence.
On to your next point, all software and technology comes with trials and tribulations, that said, Proxmox is most definitely worthy of being the backbone of SkySilk. It provides full cluster management, failover capabilities, a rather strict enforcement of secured multi-tenancy[2], and an expansive API upon which we have been able to develop a robust and stable cloud platform. When you have multiple clusters in different regions, a management layer that recovers from a node fault in the middle of the night is a godsend. Plus it isn’t particularly bloated and doesn’t require a license to press the power button.
By the way, there is no harm in running a composite LXC + KVM environment on the same hardware, we just have to be diligent with resource provisioning so that we can guarantee quality of service. That said, KVM and custom ISO offerings are on the docket, and will most likely be served on better hardware. And hopefully Windows as well. For now though, we only offer LXC because the reduced overhead of containers allows us to squeeze just a little bit more value out of our hardware. Interestingly, this also translates into performance benefits for our users at the expense of being locked into a specific kernel version.
True, we do not currently support the ability to re-install an OS but it is coming on our future features list. As a workaround, users can always take a snapshot and use that to revert to a clean OS state. And as referenced above, if you are in need of something specific as far as images or distros go we encourage you to reach out so we know what to prioritize.
As for the stability of our product and our ability to support it, we have just finished an extensive beta testing period that saw over 20,000 LXC container deployments by selected beta testers. We have thoroughly vetted & tested our platform to the point where it is now a quality, production-ready product we are extremely proud of and understand how to support well.
That’s not to say we don’t have areas where we can improve; we know that’s the case without a doubt, and are working hard to grow our team and platform at the same time. In that same vein, our approach up to this point has been anything but lazy, and we don’t plan on changing that any time soon. 🙂
Footnotes:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STONITH
[2] If you can’t get your software to run feel free to reach out to support, we do grant more leash for certain use cases.
