Load Distribution without Single Point of Failure

[mark]

I'm not gonna lie. I don't understand how this area of the cloud works... AT ALL.

How is load distribution and balancing accomplished without creating a single point of failure? Or if there is a single point of failure, can one use their cloud to keep synchronized live backups?

[silverlining]

Mark:

I have seen this done a couple of ways. The first way is the utilization of hardware based load balancers in front of the solution. Traditional and nothing mysterious about the setup.

The second way is the utilization of software based load balancing within the Cloud itself. Considering load balancing applications are low overhead the inclusion of this is pretty unique as the expansion of the solution takes place, the overall ability to scale your load balancers, firewalls, nas units within the cloud scale right along with it.

You should really see a demo of 3Tera, it's visually very neat to see the overall configuration options available with this product. If your interested in seeing one, let me know and I can arrange it.

[jsmart]

Hello,

the only possible way to eliminate all single points of failure is to have copies of your application running in multiple datacenters that are geographically remote and running either in an active/passive or active/active mode with a failover mechanism.

we clearly have seen this in the recent past with outages at AWS and even traditional DCs like the planet in Dallas, where there were several hours of outages for huge # of customers where it was not possible for any redundant services in those locations to even be activated.

i could explain several ways that this works, most would sound like im trying to sell my product as we are the only "cloud" platform out there that can allow you to pick the datacenters in which your services are provisioned.

But; in general, you need a replicated file system, a replicated database, and some type of DDNS or multi-homed DNS service that can reroute your traffic when one of the locations goes away.

I'd be more than happy to elaborate on some of the HA/FT designs that i have worked on in the past, most would relate to building infrastructure in AppLogic (www.3tera.com) based clouds.

--Jessie

[mark]

Thank you very much for the info Jessie. I appreciate it a lot.

[datums]

With AWS you can choose to deploy your instance in any of their 3 active EC2 datacenters.
What this does is gives you the ability (using the Elastic IP functionality) to route your ip to a new deployment. This works well when you're working on a budget and duplicating your setup is not an option. Currently the only data centers available are on the east coast I'm sure that will change in the next year.