High Scalability Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.

Update: InfoQ links to a few excellent Eucalyptus updates: Velocity Conference Video by Rich Wolski and a Visualization.com interview Rich Wolski on Eucalyptus: Open Source Cloud Computing.

Eucalyptus is generating some excitement on the Cloud Computing group as a potential vendor neutral EC2 compatible cloud platform. Two reasons why Eucalyptus is potentially important: private clouds and cloud portability:

A report from the CloudCamp conference on cloud computing, held in London in July 2008.

Now you can buy more cores on EC2 without adding more machines:

Recently, Google announced Google App Engine, another announcement in the rapidly growing world of cloud computing. This brings up some very serious questions:

1. If we want to take advantage of one of the clouds, are we doomed to be locked-in for life?
2. Must we re-write our existing applications to use the cloud?
3. Do we need to learn a brand new technology or language for the cloud?

This post presents a pattern that will enable us to abstract our application code from the underlying cloud provider infrastructure. This will enable us to easily migrate our EXISTING applications to cloud based environment thus avoiding the need for a complete re-write.

Scalr is a fully redundant, self-curing and self-scaling hosting environment utilizing Amazon's EC2. It has been recently open sourced on Google Code.

Scalr 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.
Scalr promises automatic high-availability and scaling for developers by health and load monitoring.

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.

Amazon is fixing two of their major problems: no static IP addresses and single datacenter operation. By adding these two new features developers can finally build a no apology system on Amazon. Before you always had to throw in an apology or two. No, we don't have low failover times because of the silly DNS games and unexceptionable DNS update and propagation times and no, we don't operate in more than one datacenter. No more. Now Amazon is adding Elastic IP Addresses and Availability Zones.

Elastic IP addresses are far better than normal IP addresses because they are both in tight with Jessica Alba and they are:

Update 2: Summize Computes Computing Resources for a Startup. Lots of nice graphs showing Amazon is hard to beat for small machines and become less cost efficient for well used larger machines. Long term storage costs may eat your saving away. And out of cloud bandwidth costs are high.
Update: via ProductionScale, a nice Digital Web article on how to setup S3 to store media files and how Blue Origin was able to handle 3.5 million requests and 758 GBs in bandwidth in a single day for very little $$$. Also a Right Scale article on Network performance within Amazon EC2 and to Amazon S3. 75MB/s between EC2 instances, 10.2MB/s between EC2 and S3 for download, 6.9MB/s upload.

Now that Amazon's S3 (storage service) is out of beta and EC2 (elastic compute cloud) has added new instance types (the class of machine you can rent) with more CPU and more RAM, I thought it would be interesting to take a look out how their pricing stacks up.

The quick conclusion:the more you scale the more you save. A six node configuration in Amazon is about half the cost of a similar setup using a service provider. But cost may not be everything...

Scoble the Ubiquitous has a fascinating post on how Mogulus, a live video channel startup, uses S3/EC2 and doesn't own a single server. The trends that have been happening for a while now are going mainstream. To do great things you no longer need to start by creating a huge war chest. You can forage off the land, like any good mobile, light weight fighting unit.

For a strategy hit he mentions the same needed change in perspective as Beau Lebens talked about when making FeedBlendr:

One tip he gave us is that when using Amazon’s services you have to design your systems with the assumption that they will never be up and running. What he means by that is services are “volatile” and can go up and down without notice. So, he’s designed his systems to survive that. He told me that it meant his engineering teams had to be quite disciplined in designing their architecture.

A man had a dream. His dream was to blend a bunch of RSS/Atom/RDF feeds into a single feed. The man is Beau Lebens of Feedville and like most dreamers he was a little short on coin. So he took refuge in the home of a cheap hosting provider and Beau realized his dream, creating FEEDblendr. But FEEDblendr chewed up so much CPU creating blended feeds that the cheap hosting provider ordered Beau to find another home. Where was Beau to go? He eventually found a new home in the virtual machine room of Amazon's EC2. This is the story of how Beau was finally able to create his one feeds safe within the cradle of affordable CPU cycles.

Amazon's EC2 sounds good, but how do you make use of all that throbbing CPU power? A few companies are stepping up to fill the how-to gap. Elastra provides unlimited on-demand creation of MySQL and PostgresSQL instances for $.50/server/hour. They contend their clusters perform "nearly" as well as a local database deployed using local storage.

RightScale says they "enable you to run your entire web business on Amazon Web Services with reliability, scalability and performance – and pushbutton control of complex system administration tasks." This includes web servers, DNS, and MySQL services. Prices start at $500 a month.

Later I'll write more about these and other related services like 3tera, but these services are the canary in the coal mine, the face of change, the bellwether of the new data center. How we build scalable web sites is about to change.

Excellent article on using Hadoop in Amazon's services environment to solve real problems for very little money. It's excellent because it shows how the stack works together and it actually seems like something a real human could do.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Can you really create an infinitely scalable infrastructure for less than $100 using Amazon's storage, grid, and queuing services platform? It appears so, at least for the right application. Amazon beams a spot light on the future battle of the roll-your-own versus the connect-the-dots approach to building next generation websites using core external services. Their argument is strong. Using Amazon's platform you can quickly build an infrastructure that would otherwise take an eternity to make, a pile of money to create, and an unbounded mass of people to implement and maintain. Yet Amazon doesn't provide SLAs, so you can you really trust them with your crown jewels? Facebook recently leap frogged Amazon's vision with an even more comprehensive set of services. The battle for the future is on.