Cloud computing: Learn to scale server up/down automatically

Question

I'm really impressed with the power of cloud computing when it comes to the possibility to scale up and down your facilities depending on your load.

How can I shift my paradigm and learn to write my applications in that way? Write it once and forget(no matter of the future load) would be the best solution.

How can I practice my skills in that area? Setup virtualization environment when I can add another VMs into the private cloud(via command line?) on some smart algorithms to foresee the load for some period of time?

Ideally I want to practice it without buying actual Cloud computing services and just on my hardware.

The only thing I want to practice here is app/web role and/or message queue systems scaling when current workers have too many jobs in queue. So let's rule out database scaling from the question's goal as too big topic.

Answer 1

One option I will throw out is to use a native Cloud execution framework. You might look at CloudIQ Platform. One component is CloudIQ Engine. It allows you to develop cloud native apps in C/C++, Java and .NET. You get the capabilities of scale up by simply adding workers to your cloud. The framework automatically distributes your applications to the new machine(s), and once installed, will begin sending work to them as requests come in. So in effect the cloud handles your queueing issue for you.

Check out the Download and Community links for more information.

Answer 2

You should try AWS- Amazon's offering a free tier that gives you storage, messaging and micro instances (only linux). you can start developing small try-outs without paying. writing an application that scales isn't that hard- try to break your flow into small, concurrent tasks. client-server applications are even easier- use a load balancer to raise\terminate servers by demand.