Sending Excess Load To the Cloud? 153
TristanBrotherton writes "Cloud computing seems to be a good choice for startups like ours, looking to scale easily with users. (We're providing a series of Web services, assets, and Web applications to users of our mobile client.) There are the obvious choices of Google, Amazon, and smaller shops like EngineYard. The biggest issue we have in choosing cloud computing to run our applications is trust in their robustness. If the provider goes down, we suffer. In traditional hosting environments we mitigate this with multiple sites / vendors. It's not really feasible to host on multiple compute services, so I wondered if a better option might be to set up a small (perhaps two servers) origin infrastructure in a traditional manner at a datacenter, running our applications, but then send excess load, or in the event of our origin servers failing, all load, to compute services. This would give us the best of both worlds. Has anyone done this, or had experience in designing Web applications to scale seamlessly across both environments? Is there particular load-balancing hardware we can use to do this?"
Use Clound ready load balancer (Score:1, Informative)
There is always a software solution when it comes to good L4-7 problem and not just load balancer but whole application delivery controller. One that works not only in your data center, one that can easily work in virtual environment (VMWare ESX for example) or Clound. Look at www.zeus.com (only software ADC on Gartner's Magic Quadrant).
Overload (Score:3, Informative)
An amateur shouldn't attempt this (Score:5, Informative)
Distributed computing of any kind is complex and not something to be undertaken with no experience or assistance. Hire someone who knows their stuff to help you out. Being with a business case and don't be surprised if running your own cloud turns out not to be the way to go.
Re:Will "the cloud" be there when you need it? (Score:1, Informative)
The cloud with an SLA...
http://bluelock.clients.cantaloupe.tv/?ref=twg
Stallman: "Cloud computing is a trap" (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Use Clound ready load balancer (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The C word (Score:3, Informative)
Well, you ain't gonna change people, so unless you can come up with something catchier than "cloud" you'll have to endure it :)