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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?"
All the apps I have used on "the cloud" are over-rated, if google would have just stuck to a few apps and focused on improving them, they would not have spread themselves so remarkably thin. I think this is where independent smaller software companies can have a big advantage if they are any good at recognizing the users needs.
A user wants to:
-Save time
-Save money
or both
Users will gladly part with money if your software adds real value to their lives, they won't if you're just trying to repackage the same old stuff ad infinitum, some companies can get away with packaged crap, but sooner or later they will decay due to the needs of the customers not being fulfilled and someone will come up and snap up those customers.
Software engineering right now is in the dark ages IMHO, too much is asked of the user, many programs are incompetently designed and rushed to "market" (google chrome I'm looking at you), imagine what google chrome could have been, if it accepted firefox plugins and other enhancements other browsers have had for a while.
Google chrome is
1) fast
2) simple
But that's all I use google chrome for, the hidden benefits of better engineered browser will be lost without meeting user needs. Google is definitely losing its focus IMHO in many aspects of software development, becoming "jack of all trades, mater of none" at least when it comes to a lot of their software.
Has anyone tried checked out the features and facilities that Zoho offers ? I for one use Zoho creator http://creator.zoho.com/ to teach visual application development to my grad school students and quite a few of them have gone on to develop corporate applications with persistent data -- ok, not giant ones, but useful ones nevertheless ... and all up in the cloud.
Insight into much, Influence over nothing !
It's my sig. Since when is an off-topic signature a problem?