Howdy all,

I have no experience with autoscaling or streaming, so I'm looking for
thoughts that help me wrap my mind around how to implement it in a
production setting.

I have been asked to examine the possibility of providing a consortia level
music reserves system using Variations (which I also have no experience
with). The software would be maintained centrally, but each institution
will manage its own collections, users, etc. Load is expected to vary
considerably, varying from practically nothing to possibly hundreds of
simultaneous streams at peak time. This strikes me as an excellent elastic
application.

This strikes me a good EC2 app and as far as I can tell, there are two
basic ways to achieve the elasticity I'm looking for in that environment.
The first is to store the files in S3 buckets and serve them via
CloudFront. This strikes me as the preferred solution, but I don't yet know
if I'll be able to get the user and staff clients to play well with this
configuration. The second is to have a script monitor the service and spin
up more instances when certain triggers are met and destroy them when
demand drops. But if I do that, all instances need to be able to access the
same live data. For DB data, that's a no brainer since I can just run a DB
server. But how do you synchronize live files across instances since EBS
volumes can only be accessed by one instance? Somehow, NFS strikes me an
ugly way to deal with the problem. Actually even if EBS volumes could be
attached to multiple instances, that solution would still suck as you could
have multiple apps trying to access files at the same time.

Obviously, I'm having trouble getting pointed in the right direction. I
could punt and just order capacity to handle heavy use cases. But that's a
copout, and figuring out autoscaling bandwidth and computing capacity just
feels like one of those tools that's really handy to have in your bag of
tricks. Any pointers would be appreciated.

kyle

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Kyle Banerjee
Digital Services Program Manager
Orbis Cascade Alliance
[log in to unmask] / 503.999.9787