Auto-Scaling Web Sites Using Amazon EC2 and Scalr | Hacker News Reader

Auto-Scaling Web Sites Using Amazon EC2 and Scalr

developer.amazonwebservices.com

40 pointsiamelgringo7 comments

Open-source projects need contributors not complainers. From what I've seen on the Google discussion forum there are dozens and dozens of people using Scalr on their own installs and through the scalr.net service provided. Seems they are using it quite effectively.

Is anyone using this? How portable is the configuration?

Take this with a grain of salt, as I may have judged this too quickly, but I was not impressed. The tutorial linked is indeed pretty solid and it was trivial to get Scalr up, but the product itself seems half finished (which to be fair makes sense since its very early at v.5). I also took a gander at the code, and I was equally not impressed.

I am excited at the potential of Scalr, and maybe in another few months to a year I'll take another look, but for now I would still rather just manage EC2 by hand than become dependent on Scalr.

Scalr is still taking shape as can be expected with any new open-source project. There is a new version that will be released soon which will go a long way in terms of stability and robustness. Keep an eye out for it in a month or so.

there is no such thing as immediate "automatic" scaling (at least not in the sense as amazon makes it appear).

That said, Yes Scalr is pretty cool, in fact it is almost a godsend for high traffic apps out there... but take this with a grain of salt- establishing server farms using pre-built generic AMIs to load balance your databases can come at a cost...literally.

Scalr still has some way to go but it sure does look promising.

Were looking at using Mosso.com instead of AWS, seems just an easier option for us requiring less technical knowledge

does someone know how much time it takes to start a new instance? and also the delay between 2 pollings?

I'm asking since with websites like digg, traffic can 10x for your website in 60 seconds.

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