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Orchestra Elastic Apps For Everyone »

Created at: 07.02.2012 21:24, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: Orchestra Platform php Product auto-scalling elastic orchestra release

It's been a long time coming, but we've finally made our auto-scaling elastic app capability available to everybody on Orchestra. Previously, this was only enabled on an account-by-account basis. An elastic app is smart enough to scale up when your traffic increases and scale down when your traffic decreases. You don't have to do anything, and you can deploy this sort of app right away. Sign in to your account now and select "Deploy An Elastic App" from the sidebar.

So how exactly do elastic apps differ from basic apps? Well, our basic apps offer you a single fixed amount of resources. For small apps, or staging versions of your production apps, this is fine. But for bigger things that need to handle a variable load, we have elastic apps. These apps start with one scale unit and increase by one scale unit at a time as your resource usage increases. As resource usage decreases, we scale you down by one scale unit at a time too.

But what's a scale unit? One scale unit provides up to 1.2 GB RAM and 2 Dual Core CPUs burstable to 1GHz. Behind the scenes, this may be provided by one or more server instances. We do this to maximize the redundancy of your app, and its fault tolerance to network outages, restarts, and other low-level problems that you shouldn't have to worry about. This ability to recover from problems ensures that your apps are auto-healing, as well as auto-scaling.

What does this mean for your app? Well, on a day to day basis, the app will run with as many scale units as it needs to function properly. You don't have to guess at what this might be, because our system works it out for you. And when someone links to your site in the middle of the night, and you experience a traffic peak, we scale you up to handle the increase in resource usage. And then we scale you back down again when traffic returns to normal.

How should you write elastic apps? Well, if you want to take advantage of our auto-scaling and auto-healing, your apps will need to embrace a shared-nothing architecture. In the general case, that means you need to design your app so that individual instances of it can be killed off and respawned at any moment. This means keeping all your data in separate database like MySQL or MongoDB, which we provide addons for. And it means that you need to write file uploads to a shared storage service, such as Amazon's S3. But whatever you do, don't write anything important to local filesystem, or it will be lost when we auto-scale or auto-heal.

If you have any questions about this, or about how best to build elastic apps for Orchestra, please get in touch. At the moment, apps are capped to eight scale units. If you need more than that, you can request a higher cap by submitting a support ticket. In the future, we plan to add more intelligent ways of handling and safe-guarding scale unit allocation. We'd love to hear your thoughts. And if you haven't seen it already, check out our revamped pricing model.

Orchestra Users: We Want to Hear From You! »

Created at: 27.10.2011 21:53, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: Contests Orchestra Platform Davey Shafik Elizabeth Naramore php

Hello! I'm Elizabeth Naramore, the new PHP Community Manager for Engine Yard/Orchestra. I started coding PHP back in 2002, and since then, I've been a pretty active member of the global PHP Community, my local PHP user group (OINK-PUG in Cincinnati, Ohio) and with PHPWomen.org, where I'm President. I also recently came from SourceForge, where I was the Community Development Manager. I'm an author, speaker, coder, and I am so happy to be back in the PHP community once again. It's something that's near and dear to my heart, and it's where I belong.

I'm also excited about getting to know the Orchestra community, which is why we're running this contest. We know you guys are doing awesome things on the Orchestra platform, and we want to hear your stories. We will pick 5 lucky winners who will not only get a write-up on our blog, they will also get a copy of Sitepoint's recently released PHP Master: Write Cutting Edge Code, co-authored by our very own Davey Shafik.

So tell us your story! What cool project are you working on? What does it do? How is the Orchestra platform helping you? What challenges have you had, and how have you overcome them? What was the inspiration for your idea?

We want to hear it all. Send your stories to me by November 15, to enaramore@engineyard.com. Looking forward to getting to know you!