Archive for the ‘Amazon EC2’ Category
Scaling on Amazon EC2 with RightScale
SynthaSite is hosted on Amazon’s EC2 utility computing infrastructure; which supplies Linux Virtual Machine building blocks you can “rent” by the hour. Using these; its possible to build an on demand scaling system; without the upfront cost & effort involved in setting up your own data center.
Experiencing heavy load for a few hours? Just fire up another 2 webservers. Load gone? Shut them down again. Total cost – a few dollars.
Whilst the Amazon infrastructure is excellent, the management tools are all command line based, and can be a bit daunting to the uninitiated.
Several third party tools have emerged to create a friendlier interface to EC2. Of these, our favourites are the Firefox plugins EC2UI & S3Fox, and RightScale’s EC2 web interface.
RightScale’s interface is a great place to get started. Their logical interface is full of tips & prompts on what to do next; so you can get your first EC2 instance up and running in almost no time.
Far from being just a simple tool to get you going; RightScale grows with you to become your “EC2 server farm” dashboard. They provide a number of standard building blocks that every scalable solution is going to need – Replicated MySQL servers, DNS & load-balancing blocks for running multiple webservers, auto-scaling – launching / terminating instances based on load triggers.
Further, for those times when the standard building blocks aren’t enough, Michael, Thorsten & team are also available to help with architecture advice & custom solutions. In our dealings with them we’ve found them extremely knowledgeable, helpful and professional – a pleasure to work with.
So, if you’re thinking of using EC2 for your next scalable web app; have a look at RightScale and see if you can’t shortcut the process of turning a bunch of VMs into a workable, scalable system.
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Another 1000 signups released
The Amazon EC2 infrastructure is treating us well; and server load remains constant and under control.
We’ve decided to open the doors to another 1000 signups; joining the 3800 who have already tested out the Tech Preview.
Welcome one, welcome all!
Labels: Amazon EC2 | 1 Comment »
SynthaSite and Amazon EC2
An all too familiar problem that Web startups face today is the need to cater for a sudden spike in traffic. We all want the traffic but can we handle the load? Funding a server farm pre-series A can be quite an expense! So when we had the opportunity to register for the Amazon EC2 closed beta we jumped at it.
This the official description of what EC2 offers:
“Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides re sizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables “compute” in the cloud.”
The EC2 configuration that the Technology Preview is running on is rather modest and does not have the ability to scale automatically. Our initial estimate was that we could accommodate up to1500 users. So far, we have signed up 2000 users and have not had to worry about overloading the server. As a result, we have decided to release an additional 2000 accounts immediately.
Going forward, we will be working on improving our server infrastructure so that we can take full advantage of Amazon’s hosting service. We hope to achieve this soon so that we can completely remove the account limitation. We’ll keep you posted…
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