Scalr on-demand service combines enterprise-scale server farms with cost efficiencies of cloud computing.

Intridea, Inc., an agile enterprise web 2.0 company, today announced the Launch of Scalr, the self-curing and self-scaling hosting environment utilizing the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. The company states that an 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. It adds that the on-demand service requires no installation or configuration, so enterprises can signup and start using Scalr immediately. It declared that Scalr is being introduced in conjunction with RailsConf 2008, being held May 29–June 1, 2008 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, OR.

It articulated that Scalr is built on Amazon Web Services. It allows developers to create server farms through a web-based interface using pre-built Amazon Machine Images 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.

The company avers that 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, adds the company.

It explained that 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.

Scalr is built entirely on standard technology, which it says is 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.

"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."

"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."