[Icecast] IceCast on PaaS

["Thomas B. Rücker"]

On 02/09/2015 11:34 PM, Diego Baccino wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I'm running IceCast on a VM on Azure. I'd like to migrate this to a
> Cloud Service. Has anybody found a way to do this?

Azure /is/ already a cloud service. It will also run just fine on AWS
and DigitalOcean, to name two more.

Can you be more specific about what kind of service you want to migrate
to and for what reason?

As you mention it in the message subject, if you mean PaaS as in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_as_a_service , then the answer is
"It depends".
PaaS seems to be mostly about running web applications using interpreted
languages. Icecast is neither a web application, nor written in an
interpreted language. There seem to be some types of services that
support binary deployments (openShift), but there it also mentions "web
apps", whatever that means. Also it would be probably significant work
to get Icecast to work, negating pretty much any savings.

While it may be possible to get Icecast running in such a context, I
don't see the benefit of doing so. Virtual machine instances are cheap
and available. Icecast will run on the very smallest of them. If you go
for e.g. CentOS + EPEL and configure automated updates, then your system
will be secure for years, including the odd Icecast upgrade, at almost
no effort.

If you want a managed environment, where some company is responsible for
maintaining it instead of you, then there are plenty of stream hosting
outfits. They tend to be more expensive than those virtual machines
though. Also their "maintenance" isn't often /that/ good either and I
fail to see the value for the premium. I've seen hosters run Icecast
versions from over 5 years ago, with known problems. I can only imagine
what that means how they maintain underlying systems.

Cheers

Thomas