Sending Excess Load To the Cloud?

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?"

Comments

Overload

[debatem1]

Break n' bake servers work out really well with Amazon's EC2. I've never had to use it for anything really critical but so long as you maintain a set of closely sync'd liveUSB and AMI images I don't see why you'd have a problem. Just make sure that your existing failover mechanisms automatically initiate the backup plan, notify you, and isolate your local system for forensics or repair, since a security breach that will take down your local system has a high likelihood of succeeding in the cloud.

An amateur shouldn't attempt this

[syousef]

Distributed computing of any kind is complex and not something to be undertaken with no experience or assistance. Hire someone who knows their stuff to help you out. Being with a business case and don't be surprised if running your own cloud turns out not to be the way to go.

Stallman: "Cloud computing is a trap"

[PietjeJantje]

I'm surprised \. is posting this without referring to the Stallman interview that was all over the nerd sites like reddit yesterday. It is very relevant. You missed it? Come on guys, you're not always the fastest and I don't care, but this is a fail.

Re:Use Clound ready load balancer

[pimpimpim]

I thought of this problem myself for a while, when playing around with the idea to try out the "cloud". You could use pound, a lot of its use for cloud computing has been discussed in the interwebs already. Biggest point of concern will be if the load balancer keeps your ssl data encrypted.

Re:The C word

[MightyYar]

Well, you ain't gonna change people, so unless you can come up with something catchier than "cloud" you'll have to endure it :)