June 2, 2008 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – Portland, Oregon-based Intridea has introduced a “self-curing, self-scaling hosting environment for Amazon EC2” in conjunction with RailsConf 2008, being held May 29–June 1, 2008 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon, USA. The on-demand service – named Scalr – utilizes the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to allow enterprise IT professionals to “quickly and cost effectively set up server farms capable of scaling up to 100,000 or more users”. According to the company, its service “requires no installation or configuration, so enterprises can signup and start using Scalr immediately”.
Developers can create server farms through Scalr’s web-based interface. The system monitors and maintains farms, providing “automatic scaling, redundancy and failover as needed”. According to the company, “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, Scalr inserts a new machine of that type into the farm to replace it”.
“Typically enterprises have to buy extra server capacity and expensive load balancing solutions to prevent spikes from bringing their websites to a crawl,” explained Intridea’s Director of Product Development and Founding Partner, Mr. Dave Naffis. “By leveraging Amazon’s EC2, Scalr automatically allocates as much—or as little—server capacity as needed. Now IT professionals can stop worrying about server availability and focus instead on enriching the functionality of their Web applications.”
Scalr also is available as Open Source software to “foster innovation and direct input into the product”. “We are strongly committed to Ruby on Rails and Amazon AWS, as well as the communities around them,” added Chris Selmer, Intridea partner and Director of Client Solutions. “They are the backbone of our agile development and ability to rapidly introduce new innovations, such as Scalr, for our customers.”
