Input Reflections on the future of Plesk. HA (High Availability) Clusters and LB (Load Balancing) Clusters for Plesk.

[Adam Makowski]

Hello everyone
First of all, thank you Plesk for your hard work and constantly providing new solutions!
I would like to talk to you primarily about the solutions I would like to see in Plesk and future development. I am primarily interested in HA cluster

Team Plesk at a slide presentation at CloudFest 2022 mentioned the planned HA Cluster in H2 2022.

Plesk at CloudFest 2022

Last week, we finally saw the long-awaited return of CloudFest to its original and physical form at the wonderful Europa Park in Germany. In between the rollercoasters left and right, it was a thrilling ride to be able to go from booth to booth in person again. At last, the Plesk team was firmly...

www.plesk.com

I have a few questions. Will be grateful for the answers to them.

1. What will HA Cluster look like and what software will be involved? DNS Cluster, NGINX loadbalancing, Database Cluster, maybe HAPROXY load balancing?

2. Is team Plesk planning to develop HA DNS? Currently there is only Slave DNS. It is a good feature but not complete. The ability to expand DNS globally is missing.
Example if I have 3 servers, in Europe, USA and Asia I would like to build a DNS cluster with the possibility of load balancing by geolocation with their own nameservers.
Customers from Europe are directed to the DNS server in Europe, US customers to the US, and Asian customers to Asia.
Cpanel supports Cluster DNS, I don't know exactly how it works, but the aforementioned service in Plesk would be great. I am even willing to pay for the additional extension if it allows me to expand my infrastructure.

3. NGINX load balancing. Same example, 3 servers in Europe, USA and Asia. Is it possible to build on open source NGINX load balancing along with geo-location?
Simply building your own CDN service for cache storage the way all CDNs work, example Bunny.net
It would be great to have such an out-of-box solution from Plesk, without paying for additional services.

4. GeoIP support - Plesk has plans for H2 2022. perhaps this applies to the services I mentioned above?

5. Database Cluster - example MariaDB Galera Cluster. Is this also in the plans and possible?

6. Perfomance website out-of-the-box. What does it mean?

I direct my questions primarily because I care about the development of Plesk because I use it and pay for the license.
I use Plesk with ARM support and it works everything very stable. I have never had an outage or crash because of Plesk software.
Plesk in my opinion is developing very well but we need modern solutions such as HA, CDN building etc.
It would be great if Team Plesk paid more attention to building these functionalities. Cluster DNS between servers around the world, cluster databases, load balancing ngnix, cache, HA.

I encourage discussion with all who use Plesk and would be very pleased to see these solutions I mention.
Greetings

 

[AYamshanov]

Hi myft,

Thank you for your feedback and questions. Let me take over questions #1, #2, #3.

1. We are working on a high-available Plesk, the solution will provide an ability to create a fail-over cluster. It means in the case of some disaster/issue with network/hardware/software on a server where Plesk works as a primary node, Plesk on a second node will take a main role and continue serves network requests. After feature requests researching, we do not position the solution as a high-load solution where Plesk can distribute load across multiple servers. The main focus is a fail-over scenario.

2. We are working on DNS improvements to provide more flexible integration with 3rd party DNS services. We are developing these changes independently of the high-available solution. The Slave DNS Manager extension (and some other extensions like Route53, DigitalOcean DNS, AzureDNS) uses this integration mechanism. The external 3rd-party DNS services are robust enough and probably could provide expand DNS globally and could be used with any support Plesk (right now, with some limitation, yes). There is no necessary to wait high-available Plesk.

3. Unfortunately, the Plesk fail-over solution will not help to create an own CDN cluster, these scenarios are out of scope right now.

 

[Adam Makowski]

Hi AYamshanov
Thanks for your quick reply.
This is good news. Can't wait for this update. Will you make it by the end of this year? is it possible?

1. This is also a good solution, I personally care about high availability and minimal downtime.
Let's talk about what it will look like:
Example I have 2 servers, Germany and USA location
- How will the synchronization of websites take place? Example in Germany server I have wordpress website example.com. Will this solution sync the database, files, settings, etc. to a second server in USA? When a server in germany crashes a visitor will see the same website in the USA? What about compatibility of user sessions? it will support geo location? what is it supposed to be used for?

2. Yes there are many extensions but many users have had problems with proper operation. That's why I use the built-in BIND solution and it works very well.
You are working on cloudflare dns extension right? this will be available in the free version of cloudflare? cloudflare can cost a lot if you think about unique solutions. what about limits? cloudflare supposedly has a limit of 2,000 domains per account. What about dns migration from bind to cloudflare?
Every customer will have to change nameservers?

3. If you create a good cloudflare dns extension this problem just might be solved. Need settings with proxy enabled or not.

 

[Anthony]

Hi @myft, thank you for sharing your feedback! It's always highly appreciated.

4. GeoIP support - Plesk has plans for H2 2022. perhaps this applies to the services I mentioned above?

In the upcoming 18.0.46 release (to be published the next week), we precompiled Nginx with the third-party ngx_http_geoip2_module (this UserVoice request).

That will allow you to configure GeoIP restrictions in Plesk manually (based on the MaxMind GeoIP database). Now we are preparing a detailed guide that will cover the following use-cases:

• Use-case 1: Deny access to a website on a server based on location
• Use-case 2: Deny access to all websites on the server based on location
• Use-case 3: How to apply geolocation-specific settings based on Service plans
• Use-case 4: Enforce rate limits to fight brute force attacks
• Use-case 5: Redirection of clients to a geolocation-specific URL

A bit later, we want to invest more in this topic to automate such activities and provide the ability to manage GeoIP restrictions right in the Plesk interface.
I hope it answers your question.

5. Database Cluster - example MariaDB Galera Cluster. Is this also in the plans and possible?

We have no plans to support it in the next two quarters.

6. Perfomance website out-of-the-box. What does it mean?

We researched how to improve the performance of specific types of websites, e.g. WordPress, etc.
Also, internally, we are preparing infrastructure that will allow us to measure website performance constantly.
Unfortunately, this topic is quite big, and most likely we will make the major deliveries here already in 2023.

I use Plesk with ARM support and it works everything very stable. I have never had an outage or crash because of Plesk software.

That's really cool and we are interested if you will provide more feedback here. How many servers do you host using ARM arch? Can you already see the difference in prices for servers with the same performance vs. x86? Is it cheaper for you?
We are seeing the trend of the increased popularity of ARM servers for the last two years and have a plan to support it in a production mode already in 18.0.46.

3. If you create a good cloudflare dns extension this problem just might be solved. Need settings with proxy enabled or not.

The good news here is that we are working on the integration of Cloudflare DNS services in Plesk. And approximately it will be available before the end of this year.

I hope this helps. Please feel free to ask more questions.

 

[Adam Makowski]

4. This is good news. I'm glad to see the development of NGINX in Plesk.
NGINX still has many good solutions that Plesk does not use out-of-box, e.g. protection rate limiting, better cache solutions.

5. greater pity, the database is important, it can be a bottleneck.

6. Yes, this this topic is quite big. There are many ways to optimize the environment. From operating system, to ngnix, apache, database, dns...

ARM is great and there is huge development ahead. Indicates that the biggest companies are investing in it, Oracle, Azure, Google Cloud
I currently use a small server with ARM. Of course it's cheaper. e.g. at Oracle, For $27 I have an AMD E4 1 cpu and 8gb ram. In ARM I can have for 30$ 3 cpu and 8gb ram. The more cpu and ram, the more favorable the price is for ARM, it is simply cheaper for more performance. There is also a greater possibility of scaling the server.

With 4 ARM cpu with system optimization I have very good results. 25k req/s with NGINX simple wordpress website, even 100k GET/s KeyDB cache, MariaDB
around 13.000 queries/second read, around 20.000 queries/second write.

3. great, I'm looking forward to it

 

[Adam Makowski]

Any updates and information on the planned relase date of HA?