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  1. #1

    Are there any cloud computing services that auto scale?

    Do any cloud computing services allow auto scaling and load balancing without any changes to your application code?

    Lets say I had a vps with a LAMP set up and I wanted to load balance Apache and mysql, are there any cloud solutions that will automatically handle this?

  2. #2
    I've been looking into this myself. Some providers claim that your website will be able to handle spikes in traffic and/or scale automatically when needed (no need to upgrade your account). They use different names such as Cluster, Grid, Cloud, On Demand Scalability, etc. I found a lot, but the ones that are affordable for the end-user are mostly new services or still in beta stages. Here are a few that I found recently:
    GoDaddy Grid Hosting
    Mosso
    Uptimehost
    iMountain
    VPS.net

  3. #3
    Join Date
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    As tucker2 mentioned there are a few out there and many are new, but the one I am familiar with is Cloud Sites from Mosso. This platform is supposed to auto-scale with no user intervention what so ever. And IIRC, it has been around for a few years, so not new at all.

    There are other ways to auto-scale different Cloud platforms as well through providers such as RightScale. They work with Cloud providers such as Rackspace/Mosso, AWS, and a few others to automate scaling behind the scenes for platforms like Cloud Servers and EC2. It is a really need tool, especially for highly complex applications. But if you are running a standard website/web application something like the Cloud Sites offering from Mosso would be worth checking out first.

  4. #4
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    I believe the most reliable shared cloud/grid hosting would be of Cartika's HAL offering.

    The others seem to offer so much for so little... Godaddy, Media Temple etc.

    Just saw Godaddy's grid - they offer 99.9% uptime which is the standard for the most reliable providers out there without the "grid" tag... 100g / 1tb for 15EUR...
    Managed.gr cloud hosting, paas, vps, dedicated, domain registration on global datacenters.

  5. #5
    Yes! You can utilize NewServers. Take a look you can reach tech support if yo have additional questions.

  6. #6
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    I was wondering, which product from newservers scales without user intervention?

    Quote Originally Posted by Marcel49 View Post
    Yes! You can utilize NewServers. Take a look you can reach tech support if yo have additional questions.
    Kevin

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Jun 2005
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    Take a look at Terramarks cloud
    http://www.theenterprisecloud.com/

    They are very impressive. Live mode between their datacenters and plug and play with 160 carriers

    They probably arent cheap but they sure are Enterprise.

  8. #8
    Join Date
    May 2009
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    On my Stratocenter.net cloud, we're in fact working on an automatic scalability facility, and anticipate having it ready by Julyish. I myself really think autoscaling is the way to go - EC2 and friends strike me as being kind of stupid because basically you have to figure out when you need more capacity and then basically they're just providing an API so you can get it.

  9. #9
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    Any DC vendor that is offering Applogic based clouds has these capabilities to allow your basic LAMP stacks to be pre-installed into a Lamp Stack pre-built template. The only changes you may need to make is a couple entries in your config.php for the SQL server and maybe a few more for links to the content of your site as they will be on shared storage. Other then that it will run and can be setup from anywhere with 1-100+ standby virtual machines that can be used for web or sql traffic that will automatically start up and shutdown additional resources depending on the SLA you design into the overall application. They also have tools for you to fully load test this and optimize things further so you do not need to waste compute resources on virtual machines that do not require much. IE load balancers, firewalls, NAS, Monitoring and similar devices.

    http://www.agathongroup.com/hosting/grid/
    http://www.cari.net/grid-hosting-vpd.html
    http://thegridlayer.com/
    http://www.800hosting.com/cloud-host...d-hosting.aspx

    There is a few more listed on the 3tera.com website under Partners if you need a European or Asian presence.

  10. #10
    Take a look at using RightScale with AWS or GoGrid or an Ubuntu Private Cloud

  11. #11
    I think Amazon web service has the latest reliable cloud hosting features supporting auto scaling.It includes elastic load balancing,auto scaling .

  12. #12
    Well it's quite easy to do vertical scaling or scaling up as some people prefer, by simply upgrading hardware spec; Therefore what you really need is to get the most powerful machine at the time when you need it. Horizontal scaling or scaling out is hardly possible without changing application code, as your app is not only serving requests as it always does, same app running on different hardware will inevitably communicate with each other, forming a cluster or several of them.

  13. #13
    Isn't cloud computing sort of the same as the old beowulf computing done back in the 80's where they just "hooked up" a bunch of computers to share the processing load?

    I believe there are a couple of national and world-wide beowulf organizations that do this at little or no aren't there? If so, why do people pay HUGE dollars for the commercialized service?

  14. #14
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    Myself, I'm always concerned when I hear people talk about auto-scaling, or building in automation to auto-create instances on something like Cloud Servers or Mosso.

    Be sure you do all your homework and really think through what you're doing before implementing or using an auto-scaling engine. Be sure it has limits. Be sure it is semi-intelligent. If I get a 5 minute spike in traffic due to say, Googlebot, I don't want it launching 10 more instances that I have to pay for for an hour; I'd rather it just slow the site down a tad until it blows over. Forget what would happen if I got a DDoS attack and had no limits..

  15. #15
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    Quote Originally Posted by ddwebguru View Post
    I think Amazon web service has the latest reliable cloud hosting features supporting auto scaling.It includes elastic load balancing,auto scaling .
    AWS is the most talked about in this forum. So just try it out.
    Blessen Cherian
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  16. #16
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    Quote Originally Posted by bobthenewguy View Post
    Isn't cloud computing sort of the same as the old beowulf computing done back in the 80's where they just "hooked up" a bunch of computers to share the processing load?

    I believe there are a couple of national and world-wide beowulf organizations that do this at little or no aren't there? If so, why do people pay HUGE dollars for the commercialized service?
    So the definition of cloud is poorly defined. Wait, strike that. It is undefined. Some people consider cloud to be just this - shared processing power; if I have 80 GHz of computing power from 40x2GHz machines, I have an 80 GHz processor. We don't really have that in this industry right now (you're correct that it does exist, many of the beowulf clusters and such at large businesses, laboratories, and colleges are capable of this, though often in a round-about way.. they don't actually appear to be ONE machine with ONE 80 GHz processor in those environments either, typically, AFAIK).

    At the moment, however, nearly every cloud computing offering I'm aware of is NOT this (and for good reason - those large supercomputers are typically running applications specially built to handle that kind of environment.. many of the ones we use in the hosting industry are not).

    Take your Amazon EC2, Mosso Cloud Files, and so on as examples; they're just some glue providing an API to launch and destroy instanced virtual machines, typically stateless or requiring extra work if you want to save off work they've done (as their local disks disappear with them when you destroy them). You can build an EC2 cluster yourself with a couple of machines, using Eucalyptus (http://www.eucalyptus.com/).

    While the former definition of a 'supercomputer' or a cluster of thousands of machines acting literally as one may be more pie-in-the-sky (pun intended) 'cloud', it isn't where we're at, and I don't honestly see us getting there for years. Too many of the applications people want to run on these 'cloud' environments do not work in that scenario right now, and in many cases are almost custom-tailored to working in the current common 'cloud' scenario, instead.

  17. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by bobthenewguy View Post
    Isn't cloud computing sort of the same as the old beowulf computing done back in the 80's where they just "hooked up" a bunch of computers to share the processing load?

    I believe there are a couple of national and world-wide beowulf organizations that do this at little or no aren't there? If so, why do people pay HUGE dollars for the commercialized service?
    First you need to get a grip on history.

    Beowulf is a linux oriented technology. The 80's predates linux.

    And people pay for execution not technology.
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  18. #18
    Quote Originally Posted by Nex7 View Post
    Myself, I'm always concerned when I hear people talk about auto-scaling, or building in automation to auto-create instances on something like Cloud Servers or Mosso.

    Be sure you do all your homework and really think through what you're doing before implementing or using an auto-scaling engine. Be sure it has limits. Be sure it is semi-intelligent. If I get a 5 minute spike in traffic due to say, Googlebot, I don't want it launching 10 more instances that I have to pay for for an hour; I'd rather it just slow the site down a tad until it blows over. Forget what would happen if I got a DDoS attack and had no limits..

    Yeah, but if it did launch 10 more instances for an hour. That would cost you $1 on Amazon (assuming you are using linux/small). That's the beauty of it. But if you use a proper scaling engine, you can set these variables. If load is greater than X for Y mins, then launch Z instances and check load again in an hour. Make sure that there are at least 5 instances running, and never more than 45. If more than 45 are needed, email X email. You can do all of that with good services like Rightscale.

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