Monday
Apr072008
Scalr - Open Source Auto-scaling Hosting on Amazon EC2
Monday, April 7, 2008 at 9:02PM
Scalr is a fully redundant, self-curing and self-scaling hosting environment utilizing Amazon's EC2. It has been recently open sourced on Google Code.
Scalr allows you to create server farms through a web-based interface using prebuilt AMI's for load balancers (pound or nginx), app servers (apache, others), databases (mysql master-slave, others), and a generic AMI to build on top of.
Scalr promises automatic high-availability and scaling for developers by health and load monitoring.
The health of the farm is continuously monitored and maintained. When the Load Average on a type of node goes above a configurable threshold a new node is inserted into the farm to spread the load and the cluster is reconfigured. When a node crashes a new machine of that type is inserted into the farm to replace it.
4 AMI's are provided for load balancers, mysql databases, application servers, and a generic base image to customize. Scalr allows you to further customize each image, bundle the image and use that for future nodes that are inserted into the farm. You can make changes to one machine and use that for a specific type of node. New machines of this type will be brought online to meet current levels and the old machines are terminated one by one.
The open source scalr platform with the combination of the static EC2 IP addresses makes elastic computing easier to implement. Check out the blog announcement by Intridea for more info.
As AWS conquers the scalable web application hosting space it is time to check out the new
Programming Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2, SQS, FPS, and SimpleDB (Programming)
book on amazon.com.
What do you think of the opportunities of using scalr for automatic scalability?
Scalr allows you to create server farms through a web-based interface using prebuilt AMI's for load balancers (pound or nginx), app servers (apache, others), databases (mysql master-slave, others), and a generic AMI to build on top of.
Scalr promises automatic high-availability and scaling for developers by health and load monitoring.
The health of the farm is continuously monitored and maintained. When the Load Average on a type of node goes above a configurable threshold a new node is inserted into the farm to spread the load and the cluster is reconfigured. When a node crashes a new machine of that type is inserted into the farm to replace it.
4 AMI's are provided for load balancers, mysql databases, application servers, and a generic base image to customize. Scalr allows you to further customize each image, bundle the image and use that for future nodes that are inserted into the farm. You can make changes to one machine and use that for a specific type of node. New machines of this type will be brought online to meet current levels and the old machines are terminated one by one.
The open source scalr platform with the combination of the static EC2 IP addresses makes elastic computing easier to implement. Check out the blog announcement by Intridea for more info.
As AWS conquers the scalable web application hosting space it is time to check out the new
Programming Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2, SQS, FPS, and SimpleDB (Programming)
book on amazon.com.What do you think of the opportunities of using scalr for automatic scalability?
Reader Comments (2)
Forgive me I'm new to the new terminology!
I've been writing php/mysql applications for a while and have a couple of servers setup running Memcache etc to help learn about scalable computing.
Amazon EC2 and S3 seems interesting, especially with the above, but am I right in thinking that I can use EC2 + S3 to store and run php scripts with mysql access? Or is that what Scalr is for? I've got it in my head that S3 is akin to a mass storage for static files, with EC2 for dynamic-ness ie, php files. How far off am I :)
Great site, been lurking for a bit and really very interesting with lots of help.
Many thanks,
Jim
Scalr looks really interesting and I hope to take a better look at it later. Scalr is something that helps you run applications on AWS. It's a younger sister to RightScale. There's a lot of work to do to get your apps working and AWS. It looks like Scalr is helping you skip over the rough spots by packaging up all the infrastructure you would need to develop anyway. S3 is like a big never ending disk and EC2 is just never ending CPU power. The trick is architecture your app to take advantage of that.