GOC

Vendor Intridea today announced the debut of Scalr, which company officials describe as “the self-curing and self-scaling hosting environment” using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.

 

For $50 per month, you can use Scalr to set up server farms capable of scaling up to 100,000 or more users. The on-demand service requires no installation or configuration, according to the company. The product is being introduced in conjunction with RailsConf 2008, being held May 29 to June 1 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland.

 

Scalr is built on Amazon Web Services and lets developers create server farms through a Web-based interface using pre-built Amazon Machine Images for load balancers, such as Pound or Nginx; application servers, including Apache among others; databases, such as MySQL; and a generic AMI that developers can customize.

 

Once a developer sets up a server farm, Scalr monitors and maintains it, providing automatic scaling, redundancy and failover as needed. 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, Scalr inserts a new machine of that type into the farm to replace it.

 

Developers can further customize each AMI in Scalr, bundle the image, and use it for future nodes that are inserted into the farm. They can also change one machine and use that for a specific type of node. New machines of this type will be brought online to meet current levels and the old machines are terminated one by one.

 

“Typically enterprises have to buy extra server capacity and expensive load balancing products to prevent spikes from bringing their Web sites to a crawl,” said Dave Naffis, Intridea founding partner and director of product development.

 

The company has also announced the Summer 2008 release of the MediaPlug on-demand service, which lets users transcode and store complex media files using Amazon Web Services.

 

With the newest version, MediaPlug has been transformed from a Web service using the Amazon Simple Storage Service to a fully self-contained Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud media appliance server, company officials say.