Selecting the Right Cloud Hosting for Your WebSite

Agenda

1. Goal of server-side architecture exploration2. Traditional single-write and multiple-read DB architecture3. Cloud Approach4. Comparison of cloud providers5. Suggested Architecture6. Cost7. References

Our Goal: Design a flexible and scalable architecture

Option 1: Traditional Multiple App and DB Read Instances

Auto Scaling

Performance Fail-over Geographical Fail-over

Maintenance Cost and Set-up

Backups Multiple Read Instances

Self setup DB w/ multiple reads

No High No No Very High Yes Yes

Option 2: Cloud Approach and separate out App and DB layer

Performance  Load Balancer Auto Scaling 

Geographical Fail-over

Maintenance Cost and

Set-up

Provider Profile

EC2 instances (recommend)

High Yes Yes Yes (set one instance in East and West coast)

Medium High Strong

Heroku High Internal Handling

No No Low

BlueBox High Yes Yes No Low Low

Internal Handling

No No Low Medium

Application Cloud Options

Auto Scaling

Performance Fail-over Geographical Fail-over

Maintenance Cost and Set-up

Backups Master-Master

Network Latency

Multiple Reads Instances

Provider Profile

Amazon RDS (Cloud DB)

No Medium-high Yes No High Yes but weekly down time

No ~500ms per transaction

Manual Strong

XeRound (Cloud DB)

Yes High Yes Yes Low Yes Yes ~500 ms per transaction

Yes Medium

Heruko No High Yes No Low Yes No Low No Medium

Self setup DB w/ multiple reads

No High No No High Yes Yes (limited to 2 instances)Not Recommended

None Yes Strong 

Database Cloud

Suggested Architecture: Two (or more) Geographically spread EC2 instances for Application layer with Xeround

for Database Layer

More Reasons ..

Xeround Database• Non-dependent on EC2 (uses RackSpace and other cloud

platforms as well alongside EC2)• Survived EC2 Ireland outage in Sep-2011• Automatic backups, scalability• ZERO scheduled outages

 EC2 Hosted Application Layer• 2 load-balanced servers can take on *50+ tps load• Easy to add a new instance manually (in ~1 hour)

*Calculated based on detailed load testing

Cost of this infrastructure

Some detailed cost estimations are present for a messaging system we delivered at the following link:

http://bit.ly/server_cost_est

References

http://xeround.com/cloud-database-comparison/ec2-mysql/

http://www.williambharding.com/blog/rails/ec2-vs-heroku-vs-blue-box-group-for-rails-hosting/  http://heroku.com

http://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/