Submission + - Sending excess load to cloud computing services
TristanBrotherton writes: "Cloud computing seems to be a good choice for start ups like ours, looking to scale easily with users. 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 simply trust. If the provider goes down, we suffer. In traditional hosting environments we mitigate this with multiple sites / vendors. Its 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. Giving us hopefully, the best of both worlds.
Has anyone done this, or had experience in designing web applications to scale seamlessly across both environments? Is there specific load balancing hardware we can use to do this?
For our specific case we are providing a series of web services, assets, and web applications to users of our mobile client."
