Thursday, January 16, 2014

New Templates: CloudLinux, SUSE Linux and Dokku PaaS

This article is originally posted on SimplerCloud's blog here.

In the past couple of weeks, we have added some new operating systems and applications into the OS templates line-up: CloudLinux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Dokku PaaS template for Ubuntu.

CloudLinux

cloudlinux-logo

CloudLinux is a CentOS/RHEL-based operating system which is built and suitable for shared hosting environment. It provides isolation between users to avoid the “bad neighbour effect” where one user might be consuming a lot of the server’s resources such as CPU, memory or I/O, affecting the performance of other sites hosted on the same server. This, in turn, will improve the stability of the overall server.

CloudLinux also has some other features, such as CageFS, which provides virtualised per-user file system that uniquely encapsulates each user, preventing users from seeing each other and viewing sensitive information, thus improving security. Some other features of CloudLinux include MySQL Governor, SecureLinks and PHP Selector.

To select CloudLinux OS template, choose “CloudLinux 6.4 (64-bit) (excluding license)” from the list of OS templates when you make your servelet order. CloudLinux is not an open source operating system, you will need to purchase the license separately. More information about CloudLinux operating system can be found on their website.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server


suselinux-logo

SUSE Linux Enterprise server is a Linux-based operating system built by SUSE, specialised to deliver mission-critical IT services efficiently and cost effectively. Similar to CloudLinux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is not free, and you would need to purchase the license separately.

Take note that the vm_initialize script to initialize the data disk doesn’t work on SUSE Linux, so you would need to initialize the data-disk manually by following the instruction in our knowledge-base article here.

To select the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server template, please choose “SUSE Linux ES 11 SP3 (64-bit”) from the list of OS templates when making your servelet order. More information about SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system can be found on their website.

Dokku PaaS

Dokku is a mini-Heroku powered by Docker and written in less than 100 lines of bash. Once it’s set up on your servelet, you can push Heroku-compatible applications to it via Git. This is suitable for developers who like to use Heroku as their PaaS (Platform as a Service), and this will provide your own, single-host version of Heroku running on your servelet. We are using Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS operating system for the Dokku PaaS template.

To have the Dokku pre-installed on your Ubuntu servelet, please select “Ubuntu 12.04.3 (64-bit) + Dokku” from the list of OS templates when ordering your servelet. You would need to configure Dokku after the servelet is provisioned by following the instructions on our knowledge-base article here.

More information about Dokku can be found on their website here and on the author’s blog here.