High Scalability Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.

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.

Slashdot effect: overwhelming unprepared sites with an avalanche of reader's clicks after being mentioned on Slashdot. Sure, we now have the "Digg effect" and other hot new stars, but Slashdot was the original. And like many stars from generations past, Slashdot plays the elder statesman's role with with class, dignity, and restraint. Yet with millions and millions of users Slashdot is still box office gold and more than keeps up with the young'ins. And with age comes the wisdom of learning how to handle all those users. Just how does Slashdot scale and what can you learn by going old school?