Google and Amazon reveal their secrets of scalability. What is yours?

We read an interesting article recently published in IT World entitled Google, Amazon reveal their secrets of scalability. Joab Jackson, who wrote the article, provides information received at various talks by Google and Amazon on how they engineer their IT infrastructure for scale. One of the key strategies used by Google was doing things on the “cheap” due to the simple business objective that “anything that scales with demand is a disaster if you are not cheap about it”.

James Hamilton, AWS’ vice president and distinguished engineer, shared some of Amazon’s strategies, and indicated that AWS often builds some of their own equipment, but also acknowledged that since launching in 2006, they were lucky to have gotten their architecture right from day one.

At Total Uptime, we understand that most businesses don’t have the ability or financial backing to build their own infrastructure. Furthermore, they often don’t have reason for massive scale and are lucky if they “get it right the first time”. For these very reasons, we created carrier-grade solutions like our Cloud DNS Service and Cloud Load Balancing and put them in, well – the cloud – offering them as-a-service. This strategy gives organizations both small and large the ability to tap into truly enterprise offerings that solve immediate business challenges while paying for the capacity or features that meet their needs today.

Cloud Load Balancing is probably our best kept secret. It gives organizations the ability to start small but grow big. Today, you might have a single production server in one datacenter, and a small backup server in another datacenter. Cloud Load Balancing can help you switch traffic from one to the other when datacenters go down. Next year, you may need to load balance traffic between multiple active production datacenters, or even route traffic based on geography to the closest one to give your visitors the performance they need. So as your business grows, Total uptime will be there for you, helping you deliver performance and maintain availability. That can be your secret of scalability.