How to put 1000 lightweight server applications in the cloud

Posted by Dan Bird on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Dan Bird
Published on 2010-04-28T14:26:07Z Indexed on 2010/05/02 22:28 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 266

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The company I work for sells a commercial desktop/server app that runs on any non dedicated Windows PC or server and uses Tomcat for all interactions with the application. Customers are asking that we host their instance of the application so they don't have to run it locally on their own servers. The app is lightweight and an average server, in theory, could handle 25-50 instances before users would notice a slowdown. However only 1 instance can run per Windows instance (because the application writes to a common registry branch) so we'd need something like VMWare to create 25-50 Windows instances.

We know we eventually need to reprogram to make it truly cloud-worthy but what would you recommend for a server farm or whatever for this? We don't have the setup to purchase our own servers so we must use a 3rd party. We have budgeted $500 - $1000 per year per customer for this service.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions, experiences and guidance.

How to put 1000 lightweight server applications in the cloud

Posted by Dan Bird on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Dan Bird
Published on 2010-04-28T14:26:07Z Indexed on 2010/05/02 20:37 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 266

Filed under:

cloud-computing

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hosting

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amazon-web-services

The company I work for sells a commercial desktop/server app that runs on any non dedicated Windows PC or server and uses Tomcat for all interactions with the application. Customers are asking that we host their instance of the application so they don't have to run it locally on their own servers. The app is lightweight and an average server, in theory, could handle 25-50 instances before users would notice a slowdown. However only 1 instance can run per Windows instance (because the application writes to a common registry branch) so we'd need something like VMWare to create 25-50 Windows instances.

We know we eventually need to reprogram to make it truly cloud-worthy but what would you recommend for a server farm or whatever for this? We don't have the setup to purchase our own servers so we must use a 3rd party. We have budgeted $500 - $1000 per year per customer for this service.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions, experiences and guidance.

Developer IT