# DigitalOcean Unveil Floating IPs



## kcaj (Oct 20, 2015)

Quote said:


> Single points of failure can be the downfall of any application. With Floating IPs, customers can associate an IP address with a different Droplet, with minimal downtime. This makes it possible to set up a standby Droplet, ready to receive your production traffic at a moment’s notice.
> 
> 
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> Floating IPs are free to use. However, due to the shortage of IPv4 addresses available, if you reserve an address but don't assign it to a Droplet, we charge $0.006 per hour for each unassigned, reserved IP. (You can relinquish unused IPs from the control panel.) To keep billing simple, you will not be charged unless you accrue $1 or more.


Currently limited to 3 per account.

Did the skies over the ocean just get a little cloudier?


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## DomainBop (Oct 20, 2015)

nova add-floating-ip <server> <address> ... 
translation: it only took venture funded DO 3 years to add something that every OpenStack provider already offers, including this VPSBoard member


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## drmike (Oct 20, 2015)

"we charge $0.006 per hour for each unassigned, reserved IP"

That's $4.32 per IP.  Per IP cost seems high...

The schtick whining about IPv4 address shortage is a hoot.  How many IPs do they have now in their multiple ASNs?  

Shame, guess they'll have to buy more with all that funny money.

I recall hearing one of the founders on about spending a gazillion a month prior lighting up new racks and how IPs were like $20k a month being spent... That was in day of rentals for sure...

Sure, it was clear skies until the BULLSHIT dreary of fake IP scarcity showed up in the marketing for a high availability / feature party.  Limit 3, yo, can't drink and IP.


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## HN-Matt (Oct 20, 2015)

IPv4 artificial scarcity booby traps are for wankers. IPv6 too. Just level up and connect to the internet without an IP, it's free and easy.


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## DomainBop (Oct 20, 2015)

HN-Matt said:


> Just level up and connect to the internet without an IP, it's free and easy.



Scaleway's platform allows you to create a server without a public IPv4 (which reduces the server price to 2 euros...a useful feature for creating database and other backend servers).  FYI, they charge 0.99 euro ($1.12) monthly for a reserved (RIPE) IPv4 not $4.32.

edit for DO users: if you created your droplet before today (the 20th) you need to follow these instructions to create an anchor IP before you can use floating IPs with your existing *VPS*: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-enable-floating-ips-on-an-older-droplet


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## Dylan (Oct 20, 2015)

drmike said:


> "we charge $0.006 per hour for each unassigned, reserved IP"
> 
> That's $4.32 per IP.  Per IP cost seems high...



That's only if you reserve an IP but don't use it. As long as the IP is pointing to a droplet it's completely free, and I think that's a pretty darn good deal. You're basically getting two IPs per droplet now at no additional cost.

I assume the high price on unused IPs is to discourage people from reserving and sitting on IPs they don't need. I don't find that objectionable since I don't know of any other provider that doesn't charge for used floating IPs.


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## VPSFAN (Oct 21, 2015)

This is my first post here...

I think this is the most lame solution Digitalocean has introduced.

Basically fake failover, Within same DC, Manual intervention required by client to switch to another droplet and their IP re-director is a single point of failure on its own.

There is no innovation nor new technology used, Its a method of marketing and money collecting scheme.

Thanks,
VPSFan


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## HBAndrei (Oct 21, 2015)

VPSFAN said:


> This is my first post here...
> 
> I think this is the most lame solution Digitalocean has introduced.
> 
> ...



I'm sorry but you're just blindly hating on something for no apparent reason, perhaps you don't understand how it works?

This system is quite cool, and I'm speaking now as a DO user, you can easily automate the failover:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-highly-available-web-servers-with-keepalived-and-floating-ips-on-ubuntu-14-04

But what I'd really love to see from DO is full droplet customization, add/remove your own features such as cores/ram/space... the templates are fine and all but it doesn't simulate the "cloud" experience and templates fit the general needs, not all specific needs.


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## VPSFAN (Oct 22, 2015)

@*HBAndrei*

*As much as you not sponsored to defend. *You don't need to be sorry - it's your opinion and my opinion was also based on being a DO customer as well as a customer of most other automation VPS providers for years. 

The link you posted  proves my point that there is no automation on DO side, everything has to be done on the client side which is lame.

I do understand how it works and perhaps that's the problem!... however let me ask you - Do you understand how it works on their end? If yes please do tell - That would be great addition to the post.

Regards,
VPSFan


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## HN-Matt (Oct 22, 2015)

VPSFAN said:


> The link you posted  proves my point that there is no automation . . . everything has to be done on the client side which is lame.
> 
> I do understand how it works and perhaps that's the problem!



A rose by any other name would tic as automa... hey wait a minute


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## HBAndrei (Oct 22, 2015)

VPSFAN said:


> @*HBAndrei*
> 
> *As much as you not sponsored to defend. *You don't need to be sorry - it's your opinion and my opinion was also based on being a DO customer as well as a customer of most other automation VPS providers for years.
> 
> ...



I care more about how useful the end product is rather than how it works on their end.


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## joepie91 (Oct 22, 2015)

HBAndrei said:


> VPSFAN said:
> 
> 
> > @*HBAndrei*
> ...


Right. And the point is that it isn't all that useful, because it's not automated.


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## HalfEatenPie (Oct 22, 2015)

joepie91 said:


> HBAndrei said:
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> > VPSFAN said:
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you automate it with scripts using the DO API?  Or has the API haven't been expanded yet to include this?


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## HBAndrei (Oct 22, 2015)

HalfEatenPie said:


> joepie91 said:
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> > HBAndrei said:
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They did expand the API to include floating IPs:

https://developers.digitalocean.com/documentation/v2/#floating-ip-actions


So you are correct, it can be fully automated, just some folks refuse to see this.


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## joepie91 (Oct 23, 2015)

HalfEatenPie said:


> joepie91 said:
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> > HBAndrei said:
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You can. That *you* can automate it, doesn't mean it *is* automated.


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## HN-Matt (Oct 23, 2015)

@joepie91 isn't it preferable to leave whether to 'automate it' or not in the hands of the client?

'Useful' and 'automatic' are not necessarily synonymous...


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## joepie91 (Oct 23, 2015)

HN-Matt said:


> @joepie91 isn't it preferable to leave whether to 'automate it' or not in the hands of the client?
> 
> 'Useful' and 'automatic' are not necessarily synonymous...



No reason they couldn't offer both.


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## drmike (Oct 24, 2015)

Dylan said:


> drmike said:
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> > "we charge $0.006 per hour for each unassigned, reserved IP"
> ...


Likely true, but good luck with the complex billing and random toss outs with such a model.  This is how a customer on a fixed spend budget ends up with end of payment cycle horror.

I haven't used DO in a long time now due to things left running (my fault) and only notification really is the bill.  Crying over small coin? Hardly.  Quite easy to toss a $20 or $50 out the window in a month on the model.   Doing something for sandbox / testing / config, get distracted and don't get back to it until whenever.  Rinse and repeat other months.

I am still a fan of fixed VPS cost and simple billing without the addons.  Any addon in fairness will create confusion and some buyer remorse. 

HA stuff, oh goodie,  maybe they can start to say with some honesty they are cloud now... Years later...  Just my opinion...


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## emdad (Oct 25, 2015)

drmike said:


> Dylan said:
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> > drmike said:
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Exactly. these 'cloud(!)' servers are always useful for me while need multiple server in multiple location for like 2/3 hr for testing. Imagine if you take 3 of them and destroy the droplet but somehow forgot the IP and get an additional 13$ bill next cycle.


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## VPSFAN (Oct 26, 2015)

@*HBAndrei*We are discussing technology no emotions here - I guess my point was clear however I do respect your opinion but overall its a lame solution - I saw an article also sharing the same opnion with some details on whyhttps://z0z0.me/2015/10/21/why-digitalocean-floating-is-fake/

As a current customer of DO - and many others my point is : They could have done better.

Thanks,
VPSFan


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## perennate (Oct 26, 2015)

> @*HBAndrei*We are discussing technology no emotions here - I guess my point was clear however I do respect your opinion but overall its a lame solution - I saw an article also sharing the same opnion with some details on whyhttps://z0z0.me/2015/10/21/why-digitalocean-floating-is-fake/
> 
> As a current customer of DO - and many others my point is : They could have done better.
> 
> ...



That blog post is laughably ignorant. Floating IP is a commonly used term, and Digital Ocean's implementation of it is virtually identical to that used by Amazon (elastic IP), OpenStack, and others. Just because they haven't launched load balancer as a service system doesn't make the floating IP system any less useful.

It's like when a company says they're going to start selling boxes, people start complaining that they're not selling shoes. wtf?

Edit: but the funniest part is, they provide three guides on how to use the system to achieve automatic failover, and people still complain:

* https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-create-a-high-availability-setup-with-corosync-pacemaker-and-floating-ips-on-ubuntu-14-04

* https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-highly-available-web-servers-with-keepalived-and-floating-ips-on-ubuntu-14-04

* https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-create-a-high-availability-setup-with-heartbeat-and-floating-ips-on-ubuntu-14-04


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## Petertk (Oct 27, 2015)

When someone wants to use floating IP the main idea is when a node goes down for various reasons the cluster to detect the unavalability of the node and to move the IP address to the other nodes with the related services with less downtime as possible. With DigitalOcean's Floating IP the node cannot need to do constant probes which has to be scripted by the user itself then if the scripts would detect a node down it would need to send a request to the DigitalOcean API which would change it's NAT1:1 policy from the down node to the active node. Therefore all these steps would generate a downtime in services, much higher then with simple clustering solution. Not talking about the fact that with scripting you cannot do a probe so often as the cluster software it does it itself. 

Regards,


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## HN-Matt (Oct 27, 2015)

perennate said:


> Floating IP is a commonly used term, and Digital Ocean's implementation of it is virtually identical to that used by Amazon (elastic IP), OpenStack, and others. Just because they haven't launched load balancer as a service system doesn't make the floating IP system any less useful.
> 
> It's like when a company says they're going to start selling boxes, people start complaining that they're not selling shoes. wtf?
> 
> ...



I've never had a VPS with DO and have no dog in this fight, but yeah, that's sort of what I was getting at. Seems to be a learning curve thing, or something that caters to different levels of skill and experience, maybe? I can see how some will want to cut to the chase from square one, but others who are new to, or not as familiar with, concepts like 'floating IPs' or 'automatic failover' may want to learn more about it at a slower pace before diving headlong into _the r__eady-made a__utomation cluster_.

tl;dr DO, you have failed to impress the floating IP connoisseurs, guess it's time to throw the towel in.


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## perennate (Oct 27, 2015)

> When someone wants to use floating IP the main idea is when a node goes down for various reasons the cluster to detect the unavalability of the node and to move the IP address to the other nodes with the related services with less downtime as possible.



I see floating IP addresses and load balancing as a service systems as mostly orthogonal features.


Floating IP address: allows you to manually move IP between instances, or automatically failover with your own control software. For example, if you are performing upgrades to your web application, you may want to test the upgrade on another server before exposing the changes publicly. With floating IP, you can commit the change just by moving the IP address to the new server.
Load balancing as a service (LBaaS): when you want to balance requests across multiple machines and have the system automatically mark nodes as failed (and don't care to have any control over this process, beyond a reasonable set of configurable parameters). In this case, the external IP isn't associated with any particular instance, but rather with a pool of instances that requests may be forwarded to.
I concede that it would be cool if Digital Ocean supported LBaaS, but I don't think it makes sense to complain that they don't support it _in the context of their release of floating IPs_. A floating IP is by nature associated with an instance; if you want automatic failover, then this association shouldn't exist, and a separate system should deliver that functionality. I also concede that Digital Ocean shouldn't be marketing floating IP's primary purpose as automatic failover, since there are so many other (more mundane) areas where it can be applied.

Regardless, the complexity of following DO's tutorial on automatic failover is negligible compared to the complexity of setting up primary-backup replication that would be needed behind the scenes to support this failover.

Also, I'm especially confused by the blog post mentioned earlier because of how it talks about failover between datacenters. It seems that they want some kind of anycast system for virtual machines, which again is separate from both LBaaS and floating IP addresses. Anycast would be nice (although there's a huge amount of complexity around coping with flapping routes in the middle of a TCP session), but that doesn't make the deployment of floating IP functionality any less useful.


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