Understading cloud computing and scaleout?

EC2 supplies boxes. Lots of them. How they coordinate with each other to provide a service is up to you.

There are plenty of tools, frameworks and techniques available to you, and which can be used in an EC2 environment, but they are largely out of scope for EC2.

EC2 supplies boxes. Lots of them. How they coordinate with each other to provide a service is up to you.

There are plenty of tools, frameworks and techniques available to you, and which can be used in an EC2 environment, but they are largely out of scope for EC2. Having said that, EC2 does provide some tools, such as SQS, EBS, SimpleDB, Elastic MapReduce and other that make it easier to leverage clusters of computers semi-transparently in solving certain kinds of problems. Also (if you were developing in Java) Elastic Beanstalk provides an auto-scaling application stack for applications bundled as WAR files.

1 It sounds trite, but Marcelo is correct. AWS offers some services, such as Elastic Load Balancing, which can help, but it's best to understand how you would do stuff if you had a lot of boxes. It won't be done magically for you.

– Iterator Sep 6 at 10:57 So no magic really hapens at all :( – adrianTNT Sep 6 at 11:19 I am disappointed that there is no hardware solution for this, like modules that get connected to each other (more ram, cpu, hdd and maybe network ports) that process the same data on the OS web server, etc. – adrianTNT Sep 6 at 11:25 There is a hardware solution; it's called a mainframe. IBM's zEnterprise System can house up to 96 cores and 3 TB of RAM in a single monolithic architecture that can be partitioned for multiple concurrent workloads and clustered (seemingly transparently). – Marcelo Cantos Sep 6 at 13:22.

The main difference between Amazon EC2 et al and dedicated servers is that with cloud computing you get an API which allows you to add more resources (more servers for example) programmatically based on current load of your servers. This API is available for many languages (PHP, Ruby ... etc ...). This will allow you to cut costs as you will only need to spin server when your application is under load, and then shut them off when you don't need them.

This is a major cost cutting option as long as the load on your applications is not consistent and you get "burst" of traffic. All of the mentioned above should be taken into consideration while you're developing ... nothing is done by magic and this is where the API comes into play. Take a look at Amazon EC2 API reference to get an idea about what you can do: API link.

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