I was enjoying a few sleepless hours tonight and ran across an interesting news release that a piece of software called Scalr has been open-sourced.
Scalr describes itself as a fully redundant, self-curing, self-hosting EC2 environment. This is reminiscent of something called WeoCEO that wrote about briefly a while back.
I twittered today that it must definitely be the year of the cloud and not the year of the Rat. I think I might be right. The cloud news releases are pretty much non-stop these days and the rate of innovation is accelerating. Exciting times and it's about time.
Since it's late and I'm not in a summary typing kind of mood here is the text from the Scalr page as printed and with full credit to the URL just below so you can go see for yourself.
Scalr is a fully redundant, self-curing and self-scaling hosting environment utilizing Amazon's EC2.
It allows you to create server farms through a web-based interface using prebuilt AMI's for load balancers (pound or nginx), app servers (apache, others), databases (mysql master-slave, others), and a generic AMI to build on top of.
The health of the farm is continuously monitored and maintained. When the Load Average on a type of node goes above a configurable threshold a new node is inserted into the farm to spread the load and the cluster is reconfigured. When a node crashes a new machine of that type is inserted into the farm to replace it.
4 AMI's are provided for load balancers, mysql databases, application servers, and a generic base image to customize. Scalr allows you to further customize each image, bundle the image and use that for future nodes that are inserted into the farm. You can make changes to one machine and use that for a specific type of node. New machines of this type will be brought online to meet current levels and the old machines are terminated one by one.
The project is still very young, but we're hoping that by open sourcing it the AWS development community can turn this into a robust hosting platform and give users an alternative to the current fee based services available.
SOURCE: http://code.google.com/p/scalr/
I need a fully staffed lab to keep up with loading, deploying, testing, and applying all the things coming onto the market lately. If anyone is ready to volunteer to fund the Cloud Computing Innovation and Business Application Labs TM (CCIBAL) just let me know and we'll get right on it.