Marcus Cake

I have previously written about Amazon Web Services and Rightscale (see Category - Internet applications and hosting). Rightscale offers to manage a farm of servers to automatically scale the processing and storage capacity of a web application to service growing, or declining, demand from internet users. Rightscale costs USD500 per month plus a USD2,000 setup fee (last time I checked).

Scalr is an open source application that performs the same function as Rightscale. You can implement Scalr yourself from here or use Scalr’s USD50 per month paid version (with no setup fee).

I have not tested or used Scalr yet.

Scalr Google Code site - Extract

• Scalr is a fully redundant, self-curing and self-scaling hosting environment utilizing Amazon’s EC2
• It 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.
• 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 project is still very young, but we’re hoping that by open sourcing it the AWS development community can turn this into a robust hosting platform and give users an alternative to the current fee based services available.