Scaling a relational database is tedious and difficult. Scalr automatically scales it by setting up replicated slaves (servers, not interns) for you when load increases.
Launching new servers when load increases can be repetitive and requires your undivided attention. Scalr monitors resource consumption on all your nodes and then launches, configures, and balances load to servers automatically—all based on variable demand.
When you run tens or hundreds of servers, executing scripts on every one of them is painful. If you like Capistrano, you’ll love Scalr’s scripting interface, which makes it easy to execute scripts on any instance or group of instances.
Databases are often a single point of failure. In the event of failure, Scalr promotes a slave to master and switches mounted storage if needed.
Cron jobs aren’t reliable when placed on ephemeral servers. The Scheduler allows you to set up distributed scripts to be executed periodically.
Web-based interfaces are great, but sometimes you want your program to perform tasks. Build a workflow using Scalr’s API, and integrate into your operations.
Scalr supports all of Amazon’s special features, like EBS, ELB, CloudFront, S3, Auto-scaling, and CloudWatch.
Most software-as-a-service companies take from the community but don’t give back. Scalr is dedicated to open source and releases all its software under the Apache license.
Servers crash. When this happens at 4am, who wants to wake up and fix it? Scalr detects server failure and resolves it by replacing it with a fresh copy or by restarting critical services.
User data is all important, and losing any is out of the question. Scalr lets you set recurring automated backups in a single click.
DNS management can be fairly painful, especially if you don’t know the difference between a CNAME record and an A record. Scalr automatically creates and updates DNS records for you, should you be on Amazon EC2, Rackspace or any other public and private infrastructure. Painless!
Large amounts of servers can be messy to deal with. Group your servers by application and even by environment, such as dev, QA, and prod.
Scalable web infrastructure generates tons of data. Scalr lets you visualize this data with an events timeline, load visualization, and many statistics graphs.
Want to connect to your database to edit a few fields? Change your database schema? Scalr makes this super easy by integrating the popular PHPMyAdmin framework to give you a web-based interface to your data.
It’s hard to diagnose and check the health of large databases. Scalr provides a database dashboard that gives you data such as replication stats (e.g. seconds_behind_master and operations per second).
When you’re responsible for keeping a website working, being on the run can be stressful. Use Scalr Remote to check your infrastructure, execute scripts, and view load on your iPhone.
If you need 20 Apache servers set up, you’ll go nuts repeating configuration for all of them. Scalr keeps you sane by allowing you to snapshot machines, deploy copies as servers, and version all of them.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket! Use cross-region and cross-cloud server with multi-cloud deployment for higher availability and better fault tolerance.
Don’t expose your infrastructure to malicious activity. Scalr dynamically modifies your firewall to allow connections from only your other servers.
Even though the web stack is fairly standardized—most users use LAMP—setup and configuration is lengthy and repetitive. Scalr streamlines the process of creating infrastructure by auto-provisioning and auto-configuring everything around your application.
Some applications scale differently compared to the rest. You can set custom scaling options for each component of your architecture to optimize the metrics by which you scale.
When you grow to hundreds or thousands of instances in the cloud, managing keys to SSH into instances can be extremely challenging. Scalr provides one-click SSH access to any of your instances—using secure key access—and lets you re-download keys if you lose them.
Cloud computing introduces a new set of best practices, as well as new security issues. Scalr makes adoption easier by providing you with a set of pre-configured server images. Simply upload your app and you’re ready!
The database is often the slowest component of web architecture. Scalr features automatic MySQL scaling that can divide reads and writes to speed up the application.
