Scalable Applications in Cloud Computing

Why use cloud computing for web applications?

Website traffic fluctuates. Time of day, seasonality, promotions, popularity, and flash crowds can all drive peak volumes. While you can anticipate and plan for some of this volume, few of us guess right all the time. To complicate matters, your visitors expect steady, fast performance regardless of the traffic your site receives.

Building your own infrastructure to handle peak traffic requires capital investment and facilities space – and no matter how big you build it, it still may not be enough. Having to choose between overspending or under-provisioning is a classic dilemma.

Cloud Computing Economics

But by deploying your web application in the cloud, you can avoid this dilemma. You can eliminate the upfront fixed investment, and still gain access to compute resources to meet peak loads with on demand scalability, while still paying only for the compute time you actually use.

On-demand Scalability

With RightScale, you can deploy your entire web application infrastructure in the cloud – whether you’re developing an entirely new service or enhancing an existing one. Your developers can provision multiple production-scale systems on demand in the cloud – saving time and expense over traditional testing scenarios and enabling faster handoff from development to operations. And if you’re starting a new line of business, you can launch on the web with a robust, state-of-the-art infrastructure without tying up limited capital.

Real world examples of scalable websites built on RightScale include:

* Social Game Providers – With tens of millions of registered players, these providers experience spiky, unpredictable demand. RightScale’s platform manages their scaling to support millions of geo-distributed players daily.
* Web 2.0 Sites – Start-up companies sometimes fall victim to sudden spikes in traffic as a result of successful PR or marketing – the so-called “success disaster.” RightScale enabled one customer to double capacity and support millions of web visitors in less than 30 minutes as they launched a new marketing campaign.

Scalable Website Deployment

RightScale Website EditionOur Website Edition has everything you need to run a full customer-facing website on cloud infrastructures with scalability and reliability. The diagram illustrates a typical configuration with two load balancers, multiple application servers, redundant MySQL database servers with recovery, failover and replication, and rolling backups to cloud storage.

Based on the rules you set, the deployment can scale up as demand grows and scale down as demand decreases. You decide when and how fast to scale – two servers at a time or fifty. In addition, use the “clone” capability to instantly create a test environment in which you can assess performance under load. Recent studies have shown that fewer than 40% of all web applications are tested prior to production due to lack of infrastructure, cost or time. With RightScale, you can easily test your application in the cloud to avoid headaches later on (see Test and Development).
Key Benefits & Features

With the RightScale Website Edition, you get:

* Everything you need to run a scalable application in the cloud, including autoscaling based on hardware and process-specific load metrics
* Dynamic server configuration
* Predesigned ServerTemplates to deploy quickly and speed time to market
* Load-balanced front-ends
* Redundant database with failover and recovery
* Advanced graphical monitoring and alerting
* Log file consolidation
* Easy testing and development using the clone environments option
* Fully customizable and extensible infrastructure
* Cloud portability and interoperability