Marcus Cake

Pre-requisite reading: Build an ebusiness on your desktop and drag it onto Amazon’s elastic cloud ; Need a solution … it is in the clouds

Rightscale and Amazon Web Services now offers essential features not previously available - automatic scaling , Manager for MySQL and Persistent Storage. The Amazon Web Services platform empowered the entrepreneur, but advanced technical skills were still required to solve storage and scalability issues to create a truly scalable application. These latest developments are critical building blocks of transformative online networks and bring the power direct to the entrepreneur. This power is available by using the Rightscale dashboard/service. They charge USD2,500 to setup your server and USD500 per month to use the dashboard. This is a fraction of the cost of a comparable web hosting configuration five years ago, assuming a comparable web hosting configuration could be built. Competitive advantage can no longer be derived from the prohibitive cost of web hosting or ability to scale a web application. Unlimited storage and global scalability is now available to the entrepreneur (that is a hacker).
A description of these features is provided below:

“Automatic scaling—the programmatic launch and shutdown of virtual servers based on load triggers—is one of RightScale’s strongest features. With auto-scaling, RightScale delivers on the true promise of utility computing by using Amazon Web Services: the ability to almost instantaneously add computing power when needed, and then turn it off when unused to reduce costs” - Rightscale

RightScale Manager for MySQL addresses the need for highly reliable, high performance database systems running on Amazon EC2 and S3. Based on the open-source MySQL database, RightScale Manager for MySQL provides an easy-to-deploy MySQL setup package (including images and RightScripts) that’s pre-configured to work with the RightScale Dashboard to provide monitoring, failover, backup, and re-launch capabilities.” - Rightscale

Persistent storage: “Calling the persistent storage a “feature” is actually quite an understatement, it really revolutionizes EC2 and enables usage patterns that any big-iron SAN user would die for. … What does this persistent storage look like? We’ve been testing it for awhile and are thoroughly impressed. The Amazon folks are clearly still fine-tuning a lot of the details, but basically you can create storage volumes in the cloud next to the server instances you launch in the cloud. Think of having a really big SAN in the cloud in which you can create volumes of up to 1TB each with a single API call, or with a simple click in the RightScale UI (yes, of course we’ll have nice support for the storage volumes on our site coupled with some neat automation and an array of pre-packaged solutions). You can mount one or multiple volumes on an instance and they appear just like the other local drives, so you can format them as you like, set-up striping and do other useful things.” - Amazon takes EC2 to the next level with persistent storage volumes, Rightscale, April 13, 2008

The Rightscale site provides details of their service and also a quality blog outlining the challenges of scalable web applications. For me details on MySQL, please see . For a non-Rightscale option, I recommend reading How We Built a Web Hosting Infrastructure on EC2   and Don MacAskill’s blog (Categories: Memcached, MySQL, Datacenter, Web 2.0 ). Don MacAskill is CEO of Smugmug.