[atlas] VM probes (was Re: Feature request for IP record route feature in RIPE Atlas)

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> On 10 Nov 2015, at 12:50, Philip Homburg <philip.homburg at ripe.net> wrote:
> 
> On 2015/11/10 13:36 , Colin Johnston wrote:
>> After having lived and still work in a Solaris physical metal land, I took onboard the virtual machine world for a webservice/emailservice.
>> The virtual world is cheaper in long run.
>> However does require a vm/ov image.
>> 
>> I think it is important cloud as such as machines are monitored and I thought vm probe would for great for that
> 
> One way of looking at it, are the people who want a VM willing to
> guarantee that the VM performs better than the current Soekris boxes we
> use for anchors? And is there is way of monitoring that they live up to
> their promises.
> 
A well managed vm is monitored/firewalled for traffic and process load monitored to work within predefined boundaries and alerting in place if issues which I thought Ripe Atlas would be good monitoring addition to.

> Somehow shipping hardware around the world sounds rather old fashioned.
> But sometimes old fashioned methods works best.
> 
> For ordinary probes, we have absolutely no control over the network.
> Probe hosts don't have to guarantee anything. So I wonder if blackbox
> testing would even allow distinguishing between an overloaded VM and a
> probe on a very bad consumer line.
> 
> Philip
> 
> 
> 


Colin