Happy Tenth Eleventh Birthday to The Cloud

August 13th, 2015 by

We had a plan to post this last year, but we forgot.

On August 13th 2004, ten eleven years ago, our first ever invoice for a virtual dedicated server was paid.

Mythic Beasts Ltd.                http://www.mythic-beasts.com/
103 Beche Road
Cambridge
CB5 8HX

To:



────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Invoice date                                        02-Jul‐2004
Invoice number                                                         
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Ref         Date            Description                 Amount
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 xxxx     2004‐07‐02  VDS256 virtual dedicated         £400.00
                      server server-name 2004‐07‐02 to
                      2005‐07‐01
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
                                      total            £400.00
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

This VM ran until 2009 at which point it upgraded to a much faster dedicated server. It’s still operational today.

Over the intervening years, our basic service has evolved through three different virtualisation technologies and the virtual machines are now thirty two times the size that they started.

  • 256MB, User Mode Linux
  • 1024MB, User Mode Linux
  • 1024MB, Xen
  • 4GB, KVM
  • 8GB, KVM with SSD

As computers have become much larger and faster it’s increasingly hard to find a single application that can fill the capacity of a single machine, meanwhile service oriented architecture means that even simple applications are now built out of lots of lighty loaded servers, virtualisation is the magic that means that fifty applications built from tens of servers each can fit into a handful of physical servers. Whilst managing the hardware has become much simpler the number of instances to manage has exploded.

Increasingly these days not only are the servers virtual but the entire infrastructure, routers and all. We now have entirely virtual networks existing within our VM cloud using virtual routers to route traffic to virtual machines.

Posted in Services