TECH Scalr / Amazon Web Services

[Peyomp]

www.scalr.net

You build your MySQL/Apache based app using their images, and it is hosted on EC2/EBS/S3 in an application farm that will auto grow as load increases, be HA, etc.

Really nice. $50 a month. You could setup scalr yourself, but $50 a month is nothing for the convenience.

The FOSS project is at: http://code.google.com/p/scalr/

Video of bringing up an application at: http://scalr.googlecode.com/files/scale.swf

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/03/scalr-the-auto-scaling-open-source-amazon-ec2-effort/

Rightscale is the other option, but at $2500 up front + $500 a month, thats not interesting at the moment. Spoke with their technical sales guy tonight and they will probably wave the $2500 up front fee for startups soon.

Cloud computing is amazing. Totally disruptive.

 

[SLED]

Love it. Might have a new venture that this would be perfect for. I'm really digging the cloud stuff. Might even move a few clients over once they get the sql server shit running

http://aws.amazon.com/windows/

 

[Peyomp]

I had to install Ubuntu off a CD the other day, instead of just booting and customizing a Xen image. I was SO offended.

As to windows... cloud shenanigans get less attractive once you have to pay for commodity items like OSes and DBs.

Also, have you seen the newish pricing on the small compute nodes? $0.20/hr for 5 compute units. The base model is $0.10, for 1 compute unit. Really nice if you're doing some computing.

 

[SLED]

Yea, I'm not really sure how they're going to do the whole licensing thing with the MS bullshit. Will be interesting though. Redmond is I guess developing a whole new kernel for cloud computing specifically? They are going to dabble in actually hosting it too, I believe. There was an article on Ars not too long ago.

.10/hr isn't bad if you're running something simple. Fucking MUCH cheaper than a fully hosting a box somewhere, and much easier to maintain and get started initially. I'm all for this shit

 

[Peyomp]

Yea, I'm not really sure how they're going to do the whole licensing thing with the MS bullshit. Will be interesting though. Redmond is I guess developing a whole new kernel for cloud computing specifically? They are going to dabble in actually hosting it too, I believe. There was an article on Ars not too long ago.

.10/hr isn't bad if you're running something simple. Fucking MUCH cheaper than a fully hosting a box somewhere, and much easier to maintain and get started initially. I'm all for this shit

$0.10/hr is $72/month, which isn't really cheaper than hosting somewhere. You can easily rent a comparable server for less, or co-locate. The benefit comes in because you HAVE no infrastructure to support. Its just taken care of for you. Whats more... you are never paying for resources you don't use. Often your farm/cluster will be minimal, to handle minimal traffic. At peak times it will auto scale to handle lots more.

So... whereas normally you would have to rent/buy big fucking server(s) to handle your largest load... and engineer your own HA solution... now all that is done for you, and you pay only for what you use. So you do end up saving money if you have a load that fluctuates (most do). You also don't have to have a data center anymore for stuff thats in the cloud. What kind of savings is that!?

You still have to work to keep your app able to scale 'horizontally' instead of 'vertically' but if you do so, scaling is 1000 times easier than it was.

Disruptive technology. Amazing.

As to MS: Yeah, they want to go to a service model anyway, and this will help them. But I can't see them competing with commodity OSes, DBs and applications in the cloud as well as they did on the desktop.

 

[SLED]

$0.10/hr is $72/month, which isn't really cheaper than hosting somewhere.

only colo prices i can find around here all start at $100/mo per 1u without even considering bandwidth charges or cost of hardware. You can get VPS solutions really cheap, but that's not even the same ballgame.

 

[Peyomp]

Load testing a 6 server farm.

Wheeeee!

 

[Peyomp]

Been working with these guys to fix some bugs in their DNS stuff. My app is setup to write to mysql master, but read from mysql slave(s). Most apps are read heavy, and this allows you to scale without making a mysql cluster. They are supposed to handle the assignment of master and slave hostnames, but they are fucking it up. They acknowledged the bug pronto though, and are working on it. Great support.

Other than that, things going great. I've setup a 6 host cluster (2 load balancers on round robin DNS, two apache servers and mysql master/slave) and it works great. I loaded up a 3 host cluster and it spawns new app servers when load increases. I haven't been able to load up the DB yet enough to get a new server to spawn, but I'm pretty happy about that. Most people find the DB to be the limiting factor in their apps.

Its pretty amazing that we've been able to engineer a scalable, highly available solution without buying anything. Total Amazon Web Services fees to date for this are < $20.

 

[Peyomp]

Ok, my work with Scalr/EC2 is done. I've load tested it and am very pleased. We have a highly scalable deployment of our application for $80 so far ($50/month for hosted Scalr + $30 in EC2 charges during development). I hit one button and it comes on within 10 minutes, and it will scale to hell and back. Until then we pay nothing.

Try THAT without the cloud.

 

[SLED]

imma try nuking up a mssql box here this week. So far they only support sql 2005 standard and express though