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I run a small SAAS website with a (hopefully) growing number of customers. Right now, I have three Amazon EC2 instances. A micro instance runs the web frontend (Rails), a small instance runs the API layer (Rails), and a micro instance runs the data layer (Postgres). Please don't judge; this is more than adequate for my needs at this time.
As I add additional customers, I know that eventually I am going to have to a) increase the horsepower of the existing servers and/or b) load-balance the web/API servers and cluster the database servers.
My question is - how do you decide from a cost/benefit standpoint when to upgrade servers (i.e. micro-->small-->medium-->large) vs. adding additional servers of the same type? I understand that there are benefits to load balancing (such as keeping you online in the event of a server crash or an issue with an availability zone).
Obviously, Amazon charges more for servers with more memory and processing power, but they also charge for ELB and services like that. If I were to increase to two servers in each layer today, that would double my costs + the costs for ELB (not including data transfer costs). It seems like a bottleneck this early on would be best suited by upgrading to medium or better servers.
What are some good rules of thumb for when to build up as opposed to out? Please keep in mind that my choice of software (cough Rails) is very memory intensive when processing large amounts of data.
You mentioned some pros to scaling out(redundancy), but forgot the cons specifically more complex deployments, and increased overhead(more operating system resources being used).
It isn't just up vs out, it is up vs out for each layer. The db tier generally wants to scale up since it avoids clustering/replication headaches. The application tier can go either way. Web servers scale out nicely since they are handling requests and the requests are separate.
Specific to amazon and their specific pricing right now(https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/), it seems like scaling up vs out is about equivalent, with scaling up to about large being slightly ahead.
Scaling up has the benefit of faster CPU + more RAM, so your app's performance may increase as a result. Yes, there's a time when out vs. up will win, but from my perspective, we have chosen to scale up whenever possible (we're on AWS as well), as we notice a performance boost to our app each time we do, in addition to allowing for additional capacity as our user base grows.
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I have a couple of different projects running for the moment - some PHP apps and a few WordPress instances, which all currently are kept at a web hosting company. The contract period time is about to end and I would lie if I wouldn't say that I really had considered making the switch onto a VPS server in the cloud with the prices getting really great.
I am totally in love with the fact of being able to turn the performance up or down when demand increases, or goes away and thereby cut the costs.
With my background as a PHP developer, with only a little hint of Linux (ubuntu) knowledge, I am thoroughly concerned about the security if I should run my own VPS.
Sure, I am able to install and get things running with my current knowledge (and some help by Google), but is it realistic nowadays to expect that my server (LAMP, really) will stay secure by running out-of the box stuff and keeping it up-to date?
Thanks
Maintaining your server is just one more thing to worry about, and if you're a developer, your focus should probably be on development. That said, it needs to make financial sense to go the managed route. If you're just working on toy projects (I've got a $20/month VPS that I use for my personal projects and homepage, and it's pretty hands-off) or if you're just getting off the ground, VPSes have the great advantage of being cheap and giving you lots of control of your environment. You can even mitigate some of the risk by keeping aggressive backups, since it's easy to redeploy a server quickly.
But, if you get to the point where it won't affect your profitability to do so, you probably should seriously consider getting someone else to take care of infrastructure for you either by buying managed hosting services or hiring someone to do it for you. It all depends on what you can afford to lose if you get rooted and how much time you can afford to invest in server management and recovery as opposed to coding.
I wouldn't. We did the same thing because the non-managed VPS are sooo cheap, but unless you really need to install applications or libraries that are not part of standard shared host setups, in my experience, being a pure developer as well, the time spent is never worth it.
Unless, of course, it is your own tiny blog or you just want to play around.
But imagine you (or whichever automation you use) update php, and for some reasons it fails (or worse, you render your current installation unusable) - are you good enough to handle this? And if so, how long will it take you? Do you have a friend at hand who can help?
We, as a small company, are getting rid of our VPSs step-by-step and moving back to our reseller package, hosted at a good hosting provider.
Good question, though.
As for security, I have successfully used Amazon EC2 for a number of things. It's not the cheapest around, but quite comprehensible in shared data stores between instances, connection to S3, running hosts at different hosting centers etc, grouping hosts in different clusters, etc etc.
They have a firewall built in, where you can turn all things off except say, TCP traffic on port 22 for SSH and 80 for web. That combined with something like Ubuntu, where you can easily run updates without worrying much about breakage, is probably all you need from a security point of view.
You need consider cloud computing as a statement of avaibility, not cost. You can be seriously surprised about the cost at the end.
I already have optioned to use VPS hosting. Good VPS hosting is costly, these days you may find cheap dedicated host compared to VPS. Have look at hivelocity.com – I like their services.
About security, most VPS host company takes care of security for you at the infra-structure level, and some may use antivirus software on files. On dedicated host, you need to take care by yourself or contract managed support services: a tradoff.
LAMP server is cheap everywhere. You can hire a private VPS and have some security, you may count on services like DNS hosting too – this is trouble to configure. VPS can be your first step as you're doubtful and has no experience on hosting. Thereafter when you find out the advantages of having your own server, you'll migrate straight to dedicated server.
What is acceptable from a security standpoint will differ depending on the people involved, what you want to secure and requirements of the product/service.
For a development server I usually don't care so much, so I usually do some basic securing of the server and then don't pay attention to it again. My main concern is more of someone getting a session and using my cycles to run something. I don't normally care about IP so that's not a concern for me.
If I'm setting up a box that has to meet Sarbanes-Oxley, Safe Harbor, or other PII/PCI standards I must meet I would probably go managed just because I don't want the additional security work load.
Somewhere in between is a judgment based on if I want to commit the required time to secure the server to the level I want it secured at. If I don't want to do it myself I pay someone to do it.
I would be careful about assuming your getting a certain level of security just because your paying someone to manage your server. I've come across plenty of shops where security is really an afterthought.
If I understood you correctly, you are considering a move from a web host to a VPS, and wonder if you have the skills to ensure the OS remains secure now that it's under your control?
I guess it's an open-ended question. You are moving from a managed environment to an unmanaged environment, and whether you maintain your environmental security is up to you. If you're running your own server then you need to make sure that default passwords aren't in use (for the database, OS and any services on top), patches are quickly identified and applied, host firewalls are configured properly and suspicious activity alerts are immediately sent to you. Hang on, does your current web host do any of this for you? Without details about your current web host and the planned VPS, you are pretty much comparing apples to oranges.
BTW, I would be somewhat concerned about my LAMP server security, but frankly I would be much more concerned about development errors (SQL injection, XSS) and the packages running on top of my server (default passwords + dev errors).
For a lamp stack, I would probably not do it. It would be a different case if you were using a Platform-as-a-service provider like Windows Azure - by my own experience there is minimal operational overhead and you just upload the app and it runs in a vm (and yes it supports php).
But for Linux there are no such providers that I know of, which means you will have to manage the Operating system, the app frameworks, the web server and anything else that you install on the instance. I wouldn't do it myself. I would consider the options as hiring a person with the relevant experience to do this for me vs the cost of managed services from the vps provider and go with one of those two.
Rather than give you advice about what you should do, or tell you what I would do, I'm just going to address your question "is it realistic nowadays to expect that my server (LAMP, really) will stay secure by running out-of the box stuff and keeping it up-to date?" The answer to this question, in my opinion, is basically yes.
dietbuddha is right, of course: what constitutes an acceptable level of security depends on the context, but for all but the most security-sensitive purposes, if you're using a current (i.e. supported) distro, with sane defaults, and keeping up with the security updates, then you ought to be fine.
I have two VPSs, each of them currently runs Ubuntu 10.04 server. On one of them, I spend some time installing and configuring tiger, tripwire, and taking various other security measures. On the other, I simply installed fail2ban and set security updates to automatic, and left it at that. They've been running for a few years, now, and I've had no problem with either.
You should do it for fun and for learning purposes. Other than that, don't; you're wasting your own time and a lot of other people's time.
I say this because I've wasted serious time setting up an EC2 instance to host my SVN server and a few other things. I mean, I loved setting everything up and messing w/ the server; I learned a lot especially because I'd never done anything a LINUX server before. However, looking back, I wasted a ton of time and had to keep buggin #Jordan S. Jones for help.
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At my company we are looking at hosting a blog and a CMS . We are still in the process of building the product and havent made it live yet. We are looking at some hosting options. We need to have complete root shell access to the system .So, i have the following two questions.
1.) Should we go for Amazon EC2 or VPS, considering our present requirements which i stated above and also considering that we may need to scale in the future ?
2.) If VPS is the way to go for us,could you please recommend some good service.Also which plan should we go for and also how much would it cost ?
Thank You.
Disclosure: I used to work for Linode.
Speaking objectively, I've heard from several customers that have migrated both from EC2 (as well as to EC2) that say Amazon EC2 is a bit difficult to work with for hosting Web services. From the cost per resource to the various quirks of their service -- last I heard, EC2 is designed more for utility computing than running a Web site and its associated services. I would recommend EC2 more for these kinds of applications:
Processing videos and other multimedia.
Throwaway computing, where nodes are added and removed as demand goes up and down.
Any service where CPU is the bottleneck.
A VPS is a much better choice for you, as you get root and -- if a company does its VPS service right -- scaling is ridiculous easy. If you plan for scalability from the get go with a load balancing solution, you can add a node with Linode in under a few minutes.
The two front runners in the VPS market are Slicehost and Linode. Each have their advantages and disadvantages. Again speaking objectively, Linode's cost per resource is better than Slicehost's, and Linode offers a few services Slicehost does not. Both have fairly active and helpful communities, and both are reliable services. Here's a comparison of both where Linode was ultimately chosen, and a discussion on Slicehost's forums with customers taking both sides.
I'm happy to answer any questions you have, on StackExchange or off.
Go with Linode. You won't regret it. I was a customer long before I was hired.
Another thought I just had is that it's unwise to put all your eggs in one basket; I recently completed full support for the wonderful libcloud project, and Slicehost is fully supported as well, as is EC2. Regardless of what platform you choose, management tools are catching up with cloud ideals.
EC2 is only reasonable if you plan on taking advantage of the scaling. With your dev server, I'm sure you're going to want it up at all times, and with that I think the cheapest instance is like $70 a month at amazon.
Just got for Linode. Great community and all that for only $20/mo.
While I agree with other answers that EC2 is more for data processing than web hosting, I found that now EC2 offers free micro-instances for one year and you may sign up for one and play with it yourself and see which is the best option for you.
If you're not planning on scaling up and down on a regular basis I would recommend a VPS. Jed Smith mentioned two options for that and another choice for a VPS is http://prgmr.com/xen/ which I've used and am happy with. They don't offer as many options as Slicehost or Linode, but they offer more RAM per dollar than most other providers I've seen. They also don't offer any wizards or ajax console access or other high level features. However, if you're ok with setting everything up via a command line console they are an option you should consider.
I have been using https://www.atum.com for years. I was with Amazon, it just didn't cut it for my needs. We have a lot of ram and disk requirements, I found the IO/RAM to be quite bad.
I used Linode for a while, they were quite good as well. I went to Atum mainly because of a friend who was with them, had good things to say about the performance. I have a lot of customers in Canada and that is where there datacenter is because of the patriot act, it had to be in Canada so. Atum VPS has been great so far to me =)
We have been using vps.net for a while and quite satisified with it.
I love linode's offerings as well though I haven't used it yet.
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Our company is considering moving from hosting our own servers to EC2 and I was wondering if this was a good idea.
I have seen a lot of stuff about can cloud computing (and specifically EC2) do x, or can it do y, but my real question is why would you NOT want to use it?
If you were setting up a business, what are the reasons (outside of cost) that you would choose to go through the trouble of managing your own servers?
I know there are a lot of cost calculations you can put in regarding bandwidth, disk usage etc, but there are of course, other costs regarding maintenance of your own server. For the sake of this discussion I am willing to consider the costs roughly equal.
I seem to remember that Joel Spolsky wrote a little blur on this at one time, but I was unable to find it.
Anyone have any reasons?
Thanks!
I can think of several reasons why not use EC2 (and I am talking about EC2, not grid comp in general):
Reliability: Amazon makes no guarantee as to the availability / down time / safety of EC2
Security: Amazon does not makes any guarantee as to whom it will disclose your data
Persistence: ensuring persistence of your data (that includes, effort to set up the system) is complicated over EC2
Management: there are very few integrated management tools for a cloud deployed on EC2
Network: the virtual network that allows EC2 instances to communicates has some quite painful limitations (latency, no multicast, arbitrary topological location)
And to finish that:
Cost: on the long run, if you are not using EC2 to absorb peak traffic, it is going to be much more costly than investing into your own servers (cheapo servers like Supermicro cost just a couple of hundred bucks...)
On the other side, I still think EC2 is a great way to soak up non-sensitive peak traffic, if your architecture allows it.
Some questions to ask:
What is the expected uptime, and how does downtime affect your business? What sort of service level agreement can you get, what are the penalties for missing it, and how confident are you that the SLA uptime goals will be met? (They may be better or worse at keeping the systems up than you are.)
How sensitive is the data you're proposing to put into the cloud? Again, we get into the questions of how secure the provider promises to be, what the contractual penalties and indemnities are, and how confident you are that the provider will live up to the agreement. Further, there may be external requirements. If you deal with health-related data in the US, you are subject to very strict requirements. If you deal with credit card data, you also have responsibilities (contractual, not legal).
How easy will it be to back out of the arrangement, should service not be what was expected, or if you find a better deal elsewhere? This includes not only getting your data back, but also some version of the applications you've been using. Consider the possibilities of your provider going bankrupt (Amazon isn't going to go bankrupt any time soon, but they could split off a cloud provider which could then go bankrupt), or having an internal reorganization. Bear in mind that a company in serious trouble may not be able to live up to your expectations of service.
How much independence are you going to have? Are you going to be running their software or software you pick? How easy will it be to reconfigure?
What is the pricing scheme? Is it possible for the bills to hit unacceptable levels without adequate warning?
What is the disaster plan? Ideally, it's running your software on servers in a different location from where the disaster hit.
What does your legal department (or retained corporate attorney) think of the contract? Is there a dispute resolution mechanism, and, if so, is it fair to you?
Finally, what do you expect to get out of moving to the cloud? What are you willing to pay? What can you compromise on, and what do you need?
Highly sensitive data might be better to control yourself. And there's legislation; some privacy sensitive information, for example, might not leave the the country.
Also, except for Microsoft Azure in combination with SDS, the data stores tend to be not relational, which is a nuisance in certain cases.
Maybe concern that that big a company will more likely be approached by an Agent Smith from the government to spy on everyone that a little small provider somewhere.
Big company - more customers - more data to aggregate and recognize patterns - more resources to organize a sophisticated watch system.
Maybe it's more of a fantasy but who ever knows?
If you don't have a paranoia it doesn't mean yet that you are not being watched.
The big one is: if Amazon goes down, there's nothing you can do to bring it back up.
I'm not talking about doomsday scenarios where the company disappears. I mean that you're at the mercy of their downtime, with little recourse of your own.
Security -- you don't know what is being done to your data
Dependency -- your business is now directly intertwined with the provider
There are different kinds of cloud computing with lots of different vendors providing it. It would make me nervous to code my apps to work with a single cloud vendor. that you specifically had to code for..amazon and Microsoft I believe you need to specifically code for that platform - maybe google too.
That said, I recently jettisoned my own dedicated servers and moved to Rackspaces Mosso Cloud platform (which have no proprietary coding necessary) and I am really, really pleased with it so far. Cut my costs in half, and performance is way better than before. My sql server databases are now running on 64Bit enterprise SQL server versions with 32G of ram - that would have cost me a fortune on my previous providers infrastructure.
As far as being out of luck when the cloud is down, that was true if my dedicated server went down - it never did, but if there was a hardware crash on my dedicated server, I am not sure it would be back on-line any quicker than rackspace could bring their cloud back up.
Lack of control.
Putting your software on someone else's cloud represents handing over some control. They might institute a file upload size limit, or memory limits which could ruin your application. A security vulnerbility in their control panel could get your site hacked.
Security issues are not relevant if your application does its own encryption. Amazon is then storing encrypted data that they have no way of decrypting.
But in addition to the uptime issues, Amazon could decide to increase their prices to whatever they want. If you're dependent on them, you'll just have to pay it.
Depends how much you trust your own infrastructure in comparison to a 3rd party cloud service. In my opinion, most businesses (at least not IT related) should choose the later.
Another thing you lose with the cloud is the ability to choose exactly what operating system you want to run. For example, the latest Fedora Linux kernel available on EC2 is FC8, and the latest Windows version is Server 2003.
Besides the issues raised regarding dependability, reliability, and cost is the issue of data ownership. When you locate data on someone else's server, you no longer control who views, accesses, modifies, or uses that data. While the cloud operators can limit your access, you possess no way of limiting theirs or limiting who they give access to. Yes, you can encrypt all the data on the server but you lack any way of knowing who possesses root access to the server itself and any means to stop others from downloading your encrypted data and cracking it open. You lose control over your data; depending on what type of apps you are running and the proprietary nature of the data involved, this could engender corporate security and/or liability risks.
The other factor to consider is what would happen to your company if Amazon and/or EC2 were to suddenly vanish overnight. While a seemingly preposterous position, it could happen. Would you be able to quickly fill the hole and restore service, or would your potentially revenue generating apps languish while the IT staff scramble to obtain servers and bandwidth to get them back online? Also, what would happen to your data? The cloud hard drive holding all your information still exists, somewhere, and could pose a potential liability risk depending on the information you stored there--items such as personal information, business transaction records etc.
If I was starting my own business now, I would go through the hassle of purchasing and maintaining my own severs so I retained data ownership. I could control root access to the hardware, as well as control who can access and modify the data.
Unanswered security questions.
Really, do you want your IP out there, where you're not the one in control of it?
Most cloud computing environment are at least partially vendor specific. There's no good way to move stuff from one cloud to another without having to do a lot of rewriting. That sort of lock-in puts you at the mercy of one vendor when it comes to downtime, price increases, etc. If you rent or own your own servers, hosting providers and colos are pretty much interchangeable. You always have the option of moving somewhere else.
This may change in the future, as these things become standardized, but for now tying yourself to the cloud means tying yourself to a specific vendor.
This is kind of like the "Why would you use Linux" comment I received from management many years ago. The response I got was that it is a solution in search of a problem.
So what are your goals and objectives in moving to EC2?
I'd be interested to know if you'd still want to move to a cloud, if it was your own.
Cloud computing has brought parallel programming a little closer to the masses, but you still have to understand how best to use it - otherwise you're going to waste compute cycles and bandwidth.
Re-architecting your application for most efficient use of a cloud computing service is non-trivial.
Besides what has already been said here, we have to consider uniformity across the business. Are all of you applications going to be hosted in the cloud, or only most? Is most enough to pull the trigger on using the cloud when you still have to have personnel to handle a few special servers?
In particular, there might be special hardware that you need to communicate with such modems to accept incoming data, or voice cards that make automated phone calls. I don't know how such things could be handled in a cloud environment.
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I'm looking for a cost effective tool for managing an web app on Ec2. Rightscale seems to the big dog and charges for it. Scalr looks like a more cost effective solution but it's hard to find out any real customer experiences..
The key aspects I'm looking for is a load balancer (http and https) and a way to automatically bring online additional web servers capacity as load increases as well as terminate the instances when load falls off.
From what I can tell, lots of people are rolling their own stuff here. We're trying to release an app and don't really want to have to fight too many heavy sys admin battles. Given the importance of performance etc I'd be grateful to hear advise and experiences from the field on this.
I am a Scalr user, a Scalr.net subscriber, and have become a Scalr enthusiast. I cannot possibly afford Rightscale.
Scalr can do what you ask.
Scalr has three images (each with 32/64 bit versions), plus a base (generic) image:
1) A load balancer image, running nginx. A highly available setup requires two of these. Scalr will manage your nameservice, and round robin between them. If one goes down, Scalr will remove it from DNS and bring up another instance. It is possible to run other load balancers, but nginx is the default.
2) Several application server images are available, running Apache/Tomcat/Rails. You setup your application here, be it PHP/Perl/Python/Java/Ruby/whatever. nginx routes requests between these instances grouped by unique user (based on IP + browser). Scalr monitors these for upness too, and replaces broken instances.
3) A MySQL database image, with automatic master/slave replication. Just deploy your schema, and Scalr handles replication and replaces defunct servers. It will also backup your data periodically. Scalr's DNS provides master and slave hostnames, so you can have your app read from the slaves and write to the master.
All of these instance types will auto-scale based on load. You start with the base image closest to what you're doing, and then you customize them for your application. For instance, we deploy our Perl/Catalyst app on the apache server instances but we serve static content from the nginx front-end servers. We had to modify our application slightly to use read/write database handles.
All in all, it took about three weeks of working through bugs in Scalr to get our application to a reliable state where I am confident that it IS highly available with Scalr. Their support was phenomenal, so the bugs didn't bother me too much, and the system is really coming along. It is approaching serious reliability.
As a side note, the best feature of Scalr is the 'Synchronize to All' feature, which auto-bundles your AMI and re-deploys it on a new instance - all without a service interruption. This saves you the time of going through the lengthy EC2 image/AMI creation process, which can otherwise make very simple admin tasks take 20 minutes. You can use this whether you are scaling your server farm or not - it would be very handy even on a single instance.
I pay Scalr.net $50 a month to host the service for me because I think it saves me time and money. The bottom line so far is this: at my last gig, we had a systems guy working on our highly available Linux DB + app server setup for a year... and he failed to achieve the kind of reliability that I achieved in three weeks. The savings by using Scalr as compared to rolling my own are extreme.
All that being said, if I could afford Rightscale, I would be using Rightscale. But the up-front fee and $500 a month make that impossible. There has been talk of waving the up-front fee in exchange for waving the consulting that it includes, but the monthly service fee isn't going anywhere.
I should mention that at the moment, sclar.net's website is down, so if I wanted to manage any of my server farms (don't have them up atm), I simply couldn't right now. It is not clear whether scaling is working for scalr.net subscribers right now, or not. Which is to say... this is perhaps not a mature solution yet. This doesn't happen often, before tonight the only downtime I've experienced were in periods of a few minutes at a time. But yeah... its down RIGHT NOW, so I must mention it :)
I would suggest a thorough reading of the support group at http://groups.google.com/group/scalr-discuss before making your decision. If you pick Scalr, be prepared to test your setup and work through any issues you have on the google group.
I will comment on your question, since giving a concrete answer is a little ambitious.
First, I see that you have haproxy on your tags. That is definitely the best load balancing software proven in EC2. There is documentation and experiences in the AWS forums on the use of haproxy.
I am unable to give you an opinion on scalr, but Rightscale is going the right direction. One of RightScale most interesting features in their roadmap is that they are a mgmt cloud system for any cloud not just EC2 of Amazon. That makes them very promising when trying to request load balancing and upscaling in need.
Also you can signup for a developer free account on rightscale and you can test some of their AMI and free scripts, they are pretty impressive.
Well, this might sound like I am working there or something, but I am a just a cloud user, no connection with them. If that crosses your mind.
I hope this helps, at least adds to the discussion.
Geo
Been on Scalr for about two months now and have slowly transitioned several production applications to the platform with good results. I strongly recommend them for quick turn around/support and value. I would like to see them improve availability of their platform.
All in all, a good fit for the original poster based on the simple use case presented.
Every service has a bad day. AWS services see down time. However, there are still users running their apps on AWS.
I have a few farms on Scalr.net and compared to Rightscale. I don't have to pay an arm and a leg.
Overall, service is very reliable. And now with the scripting engine i can setup my own scripts to govern my instances.
With Regards
Hareem Haque
Both services (rightscale and scalr) are great. The offer is not the same and the price is not the same too. But they are both what I was looking for. Regaring our budget scalr fits my needs. I found the support through a google group very strange at the beginning, but it is very fast and efficient.
Their solution is also open source (not bad) and they also have a V2 in their roadmap with support to other providers.
Wait and see, but til now, I'm very happy with it
Deciding on the right choice may not be as cut and dry as everyone expects. I have met with and heard talks from Scalr about their platform and have also listened to RightScale discuss their platform. If you have a simple SOA (App Server - Database Server - File Server), then either choice will be right for your company.
Ultimately, if you have created some custom middleware and you rely on known sockets or specific points for handshakes, you will need to consider load-balancing and auto-scaling what you can and fall back to your own solutions for what can't be managed with either of these services.
Some people say that automatic scaling won't solve the problem
I am looking into Scalr right now and although it all looks good, I decided to continue with my own scripting for the purpose of cloud management / scaling. I have 8 servers right now and am paying only the AWS fees. I use chef (self-hosted), nagios, and a lot of other tools. My databases are mysql and mongodb, load balancer is haproxy, app layer is rails. Until I need 100s of servers, I think I will just keep scriptin' ;-)