Small businesses face a number of dilemmas when setting up their web infrastructures. A primary concern is how to make sure their website is always available for their users without jumping the gun and committing to a pricey, over-the-top solution — the newest and largest servers around, for example — which they might not even need.
We thought this would be a good opportunity to suggest our “recipe” for a highly available web architecture and to compare different options. Please feel free to contribute to this thread by proposing your own solutions to “high-availability on a budget.” :)
Here are some guiding principles:
- The solution must provide high availability and failover at all levels – application tier and the database tier
- There must be low maintenance overhead
- A cost estimate per month should be provided
Now, to my recipe:
I thought the best way to approach it is would be from the most common web stack: LAMP. Besides being widely used for web applications and relying on open source, other advantages of using the LAMP stack include its ease of development and management, as well as the maturity of the platform. All of these are factors that affect cost, so taking them into account can save you a lot of money in the long run.
The next logical step is figuring out the easiest and cheapest way to deploy a highly available LAMP-based application.
The ingredients:
- Two small, standard and on-demand Amazon EC2 Instances, to be used for the Apache PHP
- Elastic Load Balancing service
- A small-sized highly available Xeround Cloud Database instance, MySQL compatible
Estimated Cost:
$18/month for load balancing
$0.085/ hour for EC2 instance — for two servers, the cost is about $122
Xeround’s cloud database is free while in beta – you can give it a try, and enjoy the elasticity and MySQL high availability that Xeround provides. Total estimated cost, excluding traffic, is around $140/month.
What do you think? Feel free to share your thoughts here and propose other competitive deployments.
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I like this architecture a lot! A lot of people believe only a Java application can be used for high available web applications, such a simple and clean thing where you don’t even have to learn new technologies is a great way to show people that PHP can be used as well!
But I don’t think it’s fair to compare this to other deployments as Xeround won’t be free forever, I think you should mention the estimated cost there as well.
Hi Remo, it’s great to hear your opinion, and I share your eagerness for simple working solutions. I can’t say much about Xeround being free for ever, but in the future we plan to charge by actual usage and have our prices comparable to Amazon’s- so you could enjoy Xeround’s high availability and elasticity at a very affordable price.
What I think is that there is a big problem here “Xeround’s cloud database is free while in beta”.
So beta quality software is not so great. Most important thing in your business is likely to be the data and so you must be very carefull of the DB you use.
Second what price you have to pay for the database after the beta period ? 0$ per month ? 1000$ per month ? 100$ per month ?
Choosing a stack like give you no control at all to your system. You don’t know the reliability and price of your database.
You are right Nicolas, DB selection is a sensitive issue,
I invite to read more about Xeround DB, and the mechanisms it has for keeping data safe and available. consider another alternative – a basic Amazon RDS service – it is a single instance, and it may drop from many reasons. we on the other hand don’t keep data on one server, we maintain replications of the data.
About the beta, yes, it’s free while in beta, after which we plan to charge per usage similar to Amazon – so in the overall calculation it’s very affordable and with the additional benefits of Xeround’s SQL DB.
Thanks for your comments
Avi