Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Sending Excess Load To the Cloud?

Posted by kdawson on from the failing-over-into-the-mist dept.

TristanBrotherton writes "Cloud computing seems to be a good choice for startups like ours, looking to scale easily with users. (We're providing a series of Web services, assets, and Web applications to users of our mobile client.) There are the obvious choices of Google, Amazon, and smaller shops like EngineYard. The biggest issue we have in choosing cloud computing to run our applications is trust in their robustness. If the provider goes down, we suffer. In traditional hosting environments we mitigate this with multiple sites / vendors. It's not really feasible to host on multiple compute services, so I wondered if a better option might be to set up a small (perhaps two servers) origin infrastructure in a traditional manner at a datacenter, running our applications, but then send excess load, or in the event of our origin servers failing, all load, to compute services. This would give us the best of both worlds. Has anyone done this, or had experience in designing Web applications to scale seamlessly across both environments? Is there particular load-balancing hardware we can use to do this?"

9 of 153 comments (clear)

  1. I think that's already happening . . . in SIBERIA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Funny

    Lots and lots of methane there, you see

  2. The C word by jaxtherat · · Score: 4, Funny

    Please don't use it. Every time you use a buzz-phrase God kills a kitten.

    --
    http://www.zombieapocalypse.tv/
    1. Re:The C word by MrNaz · · Score: 5, Funny

      It's a term invented by idiot managers who saw all those diagrams where the wider internet is represented by a picture of a cloud and were too stupid to grasp the concept of a representative diagram, so they took the picture of the cloud to be literal, and now there is an entire generation of managers who have an image of electrons flying around the sky. They confusion they suffer is only exacerbated when there's a thunderstorm and they hear the word "torrent" to describe the rain, thinking that the storm is the result of those damned P2P users.

      --
      I hate printers.
    2. Re:The C word by Eli+Gottlieb · · Score: 3, Funny

      Web 2.0! Cloud computing! Thin clients! The network is the computer! Software as a service! Utility computing! WHERE DO YOU WANT TO GO TODAY!?

      I really hate cats.

  3. Re:Cloud is over-rated... by RuBLed · · Score: 4, Funny

    "jack of all trades, mater of none"

    yup, im in slashdot alright...

  4. Re:Cloud is over-rated... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    jack of all tribes, master of nuns.

    There, "you are still in slashdot" for ya.

  5. Re:Depends on what you are doing by __aailrp9629 · · Score: 3, Funny

    For a great example of redundancy in action, take a look in the mirror. You have individual cells dying by the millions every minute. Your memory is fuzzy at best, your pattern-recognition in your brain frequently sees things that aren't there, and you make stupid mistakes every single day. And that's fine, because the overall system is pretty damned redundant and resilient. A mash of protein goo and calcium deposits able to sustain one of the most complex information systems around, reliably, 24x7, for an average of 70 years or so apiece.

    24x7? They take mine down for maintenance every day!

  6. Sending excess load to the cloud by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    I once blew my load in a heavenly body, does that count?

  7. Re:PHB alert by TristanBrotherton · · Score: 2, Funny

    Wow, first time I have ever been accused of reading a manual...