ELASTRA recently announced their ELASTRA Cloud Server product, a server application that aims to make it significantly easier to design and deploy cloud-based applications.
The company is working to provide an application design and management system that will allow users to:
- specify their application’s components and architecture using a declarative mark-up language
- deploy and manage the application in their chosen cloud service provider or virtual machine environment, and
- monitor their application and scale it on demand.
At this stage, the server supports a number of open-source relational database components that can be deployed to Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services. This makes it possible to deploy a clustered, scalable RDBMS to your EC2 instances where the data is automatically persisted to S3 to survive any instance failures.
The product is currently only available to a limited set of users upon application, however the company intends to make it generally available in April. Pricing has not yet been announced, but it will be based on a metered system where you pay according to your usage.
If the ELASTRA Cloud Server does indeed make it simple and economical to run a highly-scalable and reliable RDBMS in EC2, it will be a huge boon to developers who would rather spend their time building applications than hand-crafting a database system to work well within the constraints of Amazon’s services.