Intridea Debuts Scalr Self-Curing, Self-Scaling Hosting Environment for Amazon EC2

PORTLAND, Ore.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Intridea, Inc., the agile enterprise Web 2.0 company, today announced the debut of Scalr, the self-curing and self-scaling hosting environment utilizing the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). For $50 per month, enterprise IT professionals can use Scalr to quickly and cost effectively set up server farms capable of scaling up to 100,000 or more users. The on-demand service requires no installation or configuration, so enterprises can signup and start using Scalr immediately. Scalr is being introduced in conjunction with RailsConf 2008, being held May 29–June 1, 2008 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, OR.

Scalr is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). It allows developers to create server farms through a Web-based interface using pre-built Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for load balancers, such as Pound or Nginx; application servers, including Apache among others; databases, such as MySQL; and a generic AMI that developers can customize.

Once a developer sets up a server farm, Scalr continuously monitors and maintains it, providing automatic scaling, redundancy and failover as needed. When the load average on a type of node goes above a configurable threshold, a new node is inserted into the farm to spread the load, and the cluster is reconfigured. When a node crashes, Scalr inserts a new machine of that type into the farm to replace it.

Developers can further customize each AMI in Scalr, bundle the image, and use it for future nodes that are inserted into the farm. They can also change one machine and use that for a specific type of node. New machines of this type will be brought online to meet current levels, and the old machines are terminated one by one.

“Typically enterprises have to buy extra server capacity and expensive load balancing solutions to prevent spikes from bringing their websites to a crawl,” said Dave Naffis, Intridea founding partner and director of product development. “By leveraging Amazon’s EC2, Scalr automatically allocates as much—or as little—server capacity as needed. Now IT professionals can stop worrying about server availability and focus instead on enriching the functionality of their Web applications.”

Scalr is built entirely on standard technology, supported and extended by the vibrant open-source community, as well as Amazon’s AWS community. In addition to being offered as an on-demand service, Scalr also is available as an open-source software download to foster innovation and direct input into the product.

“We are strongly committed to Ruby on Rails and Amazon AWS, as well as the communities around them,” said Chris Selmer, Intridea partner and director of client solutions. “They are the backbone of our agile development and ability to rapidly introduce new innovations, such as Scalr, for our customers.”

Scalr is being launched at RailsConf today along with two other Intridea services. The Summer 2008 release of MediaPlug expands the functionality of the Amazon AWS-based media appliance server. Acts As Community is a new social network custom-tailored to encourage communication and collaboration among users of the Ruby programming language.

Pricing and Availability

Scalr is available now. The on-demand service costs $50 per month and includes automatic updates and improvements. There are no long-term contracts; IT professionals simply pay as they go.

About Intridea

Intridea, Inc. develops high-performance Web 2.0 applications and services to help enterprises realize the power of cloud computing and social networking. Intridea solutions are based on the Ruby on Rails Web application framework for agile development. Intridea actively contributes to Rails directly and through open source plug-ins, and hosts Acts As Community, the social network created to encourage communication and collaboration among users of the Ruby programming language. Intridea is headquartered in Washington, DC. For more information, visit www.intridea.com.