My web application uses PHP/MySQL on the server side to fetch and store data in a database. The DB size will increase with the user base, and can be huge. The application has been built and run on a conventional server, i.e no "cloud" specific code has been written (I have no experience with cloud systems; Is running services on them any different from running on a normal server?)
My concerns:
1. If I buy space on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, can I directly port all my code to the new server, or do I have to use some APIs specific to that? Since it's pay as you go, it's highly suitable for such a requirement.
2. What are the other options for hosting a web service that would require large server space? How might apps like Whatsapp be doing the same?
Thanks.
1) The answer to the first question depends on the type of service you're buying. Cloud comes in many forms, from Infrastructure as a Service (which basically offers you hardware as a service on which you can run your software stack) to Software as a Service (e.g. Gmail, which lets you use applications (or APIs) hosted in the cloud ).
The best alternative, in your case I think it is Platform as a Service (e.g Heroku) which defines a set of technologies supported by the provider and how to use them.
Either case, how difficult it is depends on your app and the specification of the service and the level of support offered, so you have to dig a little deeper (starting with guides of how to deploy a similar app would be a good choice).
2) Startups and other medium size companies use cloud providers such as Amazon, Rackspace etc and when they reach a certain size tend to build their own data centers (e.g Zynga). There's a threshold beyond which is better to manage your own infrastructure instead of buying services from others.
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I am making a Javafx program and need to use a small mySQL database. Currently I am hosting one on my computer but I can't access it on other computers on other networks. I need the mySQL server to be accessible from anywhere. How do I host one that does that? Thanks in advance, all help is welcome.
Well you have a few options depending on how important this MySQL database is to you, how you intend to connect to it from outside, and what you want to do with it.
The naive implementation would involve opening your firewall and directing all incoming traffic using whatever port you have configured MySQL for to point to the ip address of your server. If you do this you absolutely must secure your database with a password!!! You'll also need to keep the server's public ip address handy so you know how to find it when you go out.
Use Amazon AWS, Google Compute, Google App Engine, or some other cloud platform to host a MySQL instance. All the big players also tend to host pretty awesome RDBMS solutions. The advantage here is that you're not exposing your home computer to malice and you are connecting into an ecosystem that will answer a lot of other questions for you as they come up along the way (IE - how do you ensure redundancy? Backups? Scale your network for traffic?). There's a ton of other advantages too. It's the cloud... dude...
Use a SaaS DB service such as Firebase (Note: We are leaving MySQL and SQL database territory with Firebase)
If you plan to let other parties access your MySQL instance to make use of your data, you might also want to consider implementing a REST API (or SOAP API if you hate the future) which acts as an abstraction layer to interact with and provide the data from your database in a consistent and reliable format.
Best answer I can give with the details afforded - look around though the options in this arena are near limitless depending on how and what you're trying to do.
You should be able to access your machine from your LAN pretty easily unless there is some firewall rules preventing opening connection to your machine. Another way is there are many cloud shosting providers has free tier you can signup to bring up a test instance of mysql. Example: Open Shift.
I have a PHP/MySQL application test-deployed on a server, with a domain name that I own. In order for this to be a real world scalable product, I decided to use Amazon Web Services. However, I'm new to using cloud services (this is my first), and since the past 2 days, after going through tutorials and "how to start" guides given on Amazon, I've still been unable to grasp "what exactly should I do, so that I can use my present domain name and use Amazon's services?" My users should be able to access my product using, let's say www.xyz.com which is the name I own. My PHP code gets some data from client, which it then stores in a SQL DB. This is the existing, working set up.
Now, how do I get my PHP code, to use Amazon Web Servics and store it in a database that Amazon provides? My product's DB will be continuously growing, and I will pay for whatever is used. Also, if I decide to use the PHP services from Amazon too, does Amazon host my code? In that case, what will be the domain name?
To summarize, my biggest concern is the domain name I've bought, and I've seen no documentation on how to go forward in such a case.
This is the only part I have been unable to figure out, rest was clear from the documentation..
Thanks for your help!
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud platform composed of multiple services that jointly enable you to host infrastructure and applications on it. It's not a single offering that magically does everything for you. In order to achieve your goal you will want to do the following:
Use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to spin up servers that host your PHP application. They will handle the incoming traffic for you. Have a look at this link to get started.
In order to store data you will want to use some sort of database. AWS offers various database types. Since you are looking for a SQL-type database, you will want to use RDS. This service allows you to provision a functional database and relieves you of certain administrative tasks.
In order to use your current domain, you will have to transfer its registration to AWS Route53. Just Google 'Route53 domain transfer' and the documentation will show you how to do it.
There are many whitepapers available that show architectural patterns across the AWS cloud. I suggest you read them so you can get a better understanding of the platform.
To get started quickly I recommend using Amazon Elastic Beanstalk for your purposes:
Amazon Web Services (AWS) comprises dozens of services, each of which
exposes an area of functionality. While the variety of services offers
flexibility for how you want to manage your AWS infrastructure, it can
be challenging to figure out which services to use and how to
provision them.
With Elastic Beanstalk, you can quickly deploy and manage applications
in the AWS Cloud without worrying about the infrastructure that runs
those applications. AWS Elastic Beanstalk reduces management
complexity without restricting choice or control. You simply upload
your application, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the
details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, scaling, and
application health monitoring.
Learn more about it here
regarding the domain, you could transfer it to route 53
OR
route your domain traffic by using route53 name servers
I have looked everywhere...
whats the difference between a hosted database and a cloud database they seem like the same things?
Thanks
Both "hosted database" and "cloud database" mean that the database lives on the servers of some external provider/hoster.
The hoster might even be the same in both cases.
The main difference is that the "cloud" plans are usually meant to scale more (at a higher monthly fee), so you'd use them when you expect your site to get huge soon and need to quickly adjust server capacity when needed.
On the other hand, "hosted" plans are not that expensive, but have more limitations (server speed, database size...) and are more suited for "small" websites.
Of course this isn't by any means an "official" description of the two terms, but that's the impression that I get every time I see "cloud" or "hosted" webspaces/databases/services/whatever.
It depends on the context in which they're being used, but, yes, they usually mean the same thing. When I see the term cloud database being used they are usually referencing some cloud platform like Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Azure instead of GoDaddy or HostGator or something. Plus, cloud is the new buzz word - I'm sure it sells better. Lol.
As Christian Specht said, the cloud servers really scale more. So why you need more scaling? and why there are many featured options in cloud database service selection?
Things are not like before. Before smartphones and earlier pc operating systems, users gets information from the server only when they log on the specific web page using their credentials. But now apps like facebook shows notifications, provide ads etc and collect/push other data in parallel while we are looking at something else irrelevant.
Hosted database are reliable to access the database when users log onto the web page. But in case of the lastest smart phone applications, it needs to access the database everytime starting from its birth (installation on the device). So for each installation, the minimum workload over the server is expected to raise up.
So more scalability is required here. More simultaneous connections, Input/Output operation requests are expected daily. So with the dedicated servers with the core purpose, and with the configurable package selection based on your expectation of user count and bandwidth usage, Cloud Service is not yet another marketing term, but is a helpful service.
I have developed a social networking site using the elgg framework and I am hosting it on amazon cloud (Amazon EC2, the free tier micro instance service) and thus develop a benchmark for it.I am creating around 200 columns describing each user (most of them dummy) and after that I should create around a million users with each users profile updated with some data.This is done to reflect the image of big data.When hosted on cloud we should measure the cloud's performance based on a query and an update action for all users. The problem is how to create so many users? Which tool would be optimal to choose? Done this, I should also consider storage on a file system(HDFS) and do the same with some modifications (The output should be a row and the input should be an unstructured data).
For elgg framework we are using mysql as backend. I have no idea how to start with it. Any suggestions would be really helpful.
Thank you.
I had to perform a similar task recently and came up with this script.. maybe it can help you
I have a client asking this for a requirement and haven't done this before, what does he mean by web service infrastructure?
That phrase encompasses a wide variety of technical aspects. Your infrastructure is all of the components that make up the systems that run a web business or application, including hardware. So it refers to your server and network setup, your bandwidth and connections in and out, your database setup, backup solutions, web server software, code deployment methods, and anything else used to successfully run a web business with high reliability and uptime and low error and bug incidents.
In order to make such a thing scalable, you have to architect all these components together into something that will work smoothly with growth over time. A scalable architecture should be flexible enough to handle sudden traffic spikes.
Methods used to facilitate scalability include replicated databases, clustered web servers, load balancers, RAID disk striping, and network switching. Your code has to take much of this into account.
It's a tough service to provide.
First thing that comes to mind was the Enterprise service bus.
He probably means some sort of "infrastructure" to run a lot of complex interacting web services.
Either an enterprise application that you call via a web service that can run on many instances of a web application server, or run a single instance that are very nicely multithreaded and scale to many CPUs, or deploying loads of different webservices that all talk to each other, often via message queues, until you have something that breaks all the time and requires a huge team of people to maintain. Might as well throw in a load of virtual machines to have a virtualised, scalable, re-deployable web service infrastructure (i.e., loads of tomcats or jbosses in linux VMs ready to deply as needed, one app per VM).
Then there is physical scalability. Is there enough CPU power for your needs? Is there enough bandwidth between physical nodes to send all these messages and SOAP transactions between machines? Is there enough storage? Is the storage available on a fast, low latency interconnect? Is the database nicely fed with CPU power, bandwidth, a disc system that doesn't lag. Is there a database backup. How about when a single machine can't handle the load of a particular function - then you need load balancers, although these are good for redundancy and software updates whilst remaining live as well.
Is there a site backup? Or are you scaling globally - will there be multiple data centres around the globe? Do you have redundant links to the internet from each data centre? What happens when a site goes down? How is data replicated between sites, to reduce inter-site communications, and how do these data caches and pushes work?
And so on and so forth. But your client probably just wants a web service that can be load balanced without thrashing (i.e., two or more instances can share data/sessions/etc, depends on the application really), with easy database configuration and backup. Ease of deployment is desirable, so make the install simple. Or even provide a Linux VM for them to add to their VM infrastructure. Talk to their sysadmin to see what they currently do.
This phrase is often used as a marketing term from companies who sell some part of what they'll call a "scalable web services infrastructure".
Try to find out from the client exactly what they need. Do they have existing web services? Do they have existing business logic they've decided to expose as web services? Do they have customers who are asking to be able to access your client's systems through web services?
Does your client even know what a web service is?