How to put 1000 lightweight server applications in the cloud
- by Dan Bird
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.
