DigitalOcean Mesosphere on DigitalOcean

Perhaps a good way to scale XenForo installations?

 

Mesosphere lets you run jobs across multiple boxes--it abstracts the individual boxes into a single "big box" from the application's perspective.

It makes for better resource utilization. Say you have 2 websites with 5 web servers each that are running at 50% utilization because you want to have enough capacity for a reddit hit. And then you've got another 2 boxes that run batch processes every night of some kind. You're unlikely to get hit with reddit on both websites, but it's normally a pain to setup a scheduler that passes the job to the website servers that have extra capacity. Well, you could take Mesosphere and tell it to run your batch processes on the web servers when they're free, but prioritize the http traffic. Suddenly you don't need the batch processing boxes because the extra capacity on your web servers handles the batch jobs, and treats all the boxes as a single unit.

Most folks on this board won't have enough boxes for this to matter, unless you try to do something funky like 4 $5 DO boxes rather than 1 $20 DO box, and you'd need tasks that would fit this profile well. But for big business that has 100-1000+ servers, this matters. I personally know of one company spending 6 figures on AWS every month that cut their bill by 40% because Mesosphere let them better utilize the boxes.