Your right. There isn't a whole lot of documentation. There was some talk about starting an independent documentation project, but that hasn't really gotten off the ground. I think most of use have learned by doing. * This List* is actually a great resource. I think you'll find that you will be able to find answers to most questions by posting or searching through the list.
I have to put an overview together for some guys at my work so I guess I'll just share it here. Hopefully it can make it into some kind of getting started guide at some point. Scalr Overview Scalr is composed of *Instances, Roles, Farms and Applications*. These are used to manage an application under Amazon Web Services. A Scalr *Instance* is just an Amazon instance that is manage by the Scalr management console. A Scalr *Role* is an Amazon AMI used as a template for various instances you will have running in Scalr. Each role is generally designed to fill specific requirements of your infrastructure. They are all based off of the Scalr Base roles. There are Shared roles from Scalr, Custom roles that you make and Community roles made/shared by other Scalr customers. If you want a custom role, say a special application server, you need to start from one of the base Scalr roles, customize it and then save it as a custom image using Scalr. This is accomplished with the "sync to all feature" or new role feature. A Scalr *Farm* is a group of instances, each a member of Scalr Roles. An example would be three Roles, mysql, app, www. Each role might be set to have at least two instances. This would mean that the farm has a minimum of six servers. All the properties associated with scaling an application are set with in the farm. A Scalr *Application* is basically a publicly available web address. I most cases web applications and their infrastructure can be uniquely identified by their web address, ie www.mydomain.com or mail.mydomain.com. Each application points at a specific Scalr Farm. The farm handles the requests to the application. It is important to note that Scalr also handles DNS. A domain name is associated with an application. Scalr will update DNS entries for all instances in a farm connected to the application. It also dynamically updates host files information in each instance so that each instance is aware of the other instances in a farm w/o having to check DNS. This facilitates server to server communication. Scalr Super Simple Getting Started 1. Make a new Application. 2. Choose create a new farm 3. Choose a domain name for your application. I generally buy .info versions of each of our domains. I let scalr manage these and CNAME our primary to the application web address from our primary DNS servers. 4. Choose roles for your farm. The cheapest way to mess around would be to just grab an app server. If you want to see a whole farm grab a www, app and mysql server. 5. Choose a default front-end server. This is the role name of the instances that will handle incoming traffic for your web address. In most cases it is the www role, if you only have an app server it'd be the app server. 6. Finish and start your farm. 7. You should now be able to go back and see the Scalr default webpage from your application's web address. 8. From here just play with settings Make A Custom Role Most likely you will want to make custom roles for your application. To do this you need to: 1. Start up a farm with the Scalr Shared roles 2. Once it is started, log into any of the servers and make your necessary changes. 3. Go back to the Scalr console 4. Navigate to the instance screen through the farm screen 5. Click on the drop down next to the instance with the changes you want to save 6. Choose "sync to all", carefully read each screen that follows. Make sure to change the name of the role to your custom role name. This will save this as a custom role and allow you to start up any number of instances based on this custom role with your changes already intact. Resources - Google Code - Scalr is an open project. You can use either Scalr.net or start up your own instance of the Scalr managment software on your own server. The source code, wiki and lists can be accessed from Google Code website. http://code.google.com/p/scalr/ - Scalr Screencast - There is a Scalr screencast on Google website. It has a pretty good video only overview It is a freestanding Flash Swf, so will prob prompt you to download. Just right click and play with the Flash Player. - http://scalr.googlecode.com/files/scale.swf - Scalr Discussion - Try searching through the list for answers before posting.. there's a lot of information in there. - http://groups.google.com/group/scalr-discuss - Scalr FAQ - Pretty sparse, but does have some key answers - https://scalr.net/faq.html - Amazon AWS - Worth reading through all their docs too - http://aws.amazon.com Hope this helps. Anyone else out there... please feel free to join this thread and beef this up or correct it... it'd be great to get a solid getting started guide into the "documentation project" or Wiki. -- Kevin Baker On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 8:01 AM, Fran_K <[email protected]> wrote: > > We've been building an EC2 app and have just reached the point where > we are concerned with how to scale it up and thought that we would try > scalr. We signed up and I went to the app screen and was just > mystified. The support link brought me here. Is there any > documentation on how to set up an application? All I could find was > the FAQ which was rather meager. Is there an article or web site I can > use to get started? > > TIA! > > --fran > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "scalr-discuss" group. 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