asked on
Applications in the Cloud
I love the idea of Amazon EC2 but this and others appear to be designed for web applications and SQL databases. Our product is designed to run on a local machine but I would love to be able to scale it within a virtual environment so that when we are doing heavy processing we can spin-up 20-30 servers and when want we can just use one.
I am not a developer but have a basic understanding of tech and so please forgive if this is oversimplistic.
Effectively, I want to run our application as normal on a server or virtual server but be able to scale up really quickly as and when.
If this is an unrealistic request, I would welcome alternative solutions.
Please feel free to ask questions - I can ask our software guys for responses if necessary.
Thanks!
Stuart
Who told you that? It is true that the most obvious use case is a scalable web site but it is not the only one.
In fact, Amazon EC2 is just as suitable for heavy computing needs, see here http://aws.amazon.com/hpc-applications/
From the information you provided I think that EC2 is just fine for you and so are some (not all) of the infrastructure cloud providers.
If your application is only a local one for internal use, you may need to either spin up a private cloud or a hybrid like Amazon VPC
ASKER
Great answer, thank you.
With VPC do we end up with what looks and feels like a normals windows server operating system but with greater speed than a single machine - excuse my high level and non-tech view on this!
Thanks
Stuart
However, with VPC you have access to a virtually unlimited number of both low end and high end servers, and it feels like it is part of your datacenter.
ASKER
Can I ask, would our software require rewriting to allow it to make real use of the multiple machine environment?
ASKER
Servers are computing devices that are similar to desktop computers in that they have the same basic components, but are significantly different in size, configuration and purpose. Servers are usually accessed over a network, and many run unattended, without a computer monitor, input device, audio hardware or USB interfaces. Many servers do not have a graphical user interface (GUI), and are configured and managed remotely. Servers typically include hardware redundancy such as dual power supplies, RAID disk systems, and ECC memory, along with extensive pre-boot memory testing and verification. Critical components might be hot swappable, and to guard against overheating, servers might have more powerful fans or use water cooling.
TRUSTED BY
Thanks,
Kent