The summer slowly says good-bye here in Northern Germany, which is a great opportunity to work on some more complex features for Beach. Because – let's face it – the hot season with some 30°C and more up here in my rooftop-office only leaves enough brain capacity for manually sorting PDFs by color.
So, today I am very happy to announce a new inconspicuous feature: Instance Scaling!
Neos & Flow – On a Large Scale
To cut the long story short: from today on, instances can be scaled up and down as you like by simply entering the number of replicas you would like Beach to run. Each replica is an identical clone of your original instance and shares its database and cloud storage. And, like other instances too, replicas can be deployed in a matter of seconds.
There are a couple of scenarios where you would like to scale up: For example, your customer ran this new campaign which attracts a lot of visitors to her website. At least for a day or two you need some extra power to run the website smoothly. Or you have this worker instance running which calculates statistical data, processes images or draws money from credit cards (– if you need multiple instances for the latter case, did we mention that the Neos Foundation accepts donations for a good cause? ;-)). Get the work done more quickly, by adding some more replicas.
Additional replicas are billed by the hour (like your instance) and cost 90% of the original instance price. For starters, we limit the number of replicas per instance to 10.
And if you wonder if scaling could be automated … it surely can! We did all the necessary ground work already and are basically lacking the user interface and billing mechanism. If you would like to use auto-scaling in your Beach project (which will be part of the "Premium" project plan), please let us know, so we can shift priorities in favour of this feature.
Want to scale your Neos site or use a cloud hosting environment which is tailored to Neos and Flow? How about trying out Beach? We have a 14-days free trial and a great support directly from the folks who also just released Neos 4.1 ;-)
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