Hi Everyone!

Thanks to everyone for all the testing and feedback! The good news it that we’re finally launching Synthasite into Beta and the confirmed date is 5 November 2007! Yup, it’s Guy Fawkes Day, so we hope that it will be a blast!

What can you expect in the Beta? Most importantly, we’ll have Publishing - so your site can go live after you’ve built it on one of our sub-domain names (xyz.synthasite.com). We’ll also have about a dozen site templates to start with and you’ll also be able to download your site or host it elsewhere (and edit the PHP code, if you want!).

That’s about all I can say right now, but there is a lot more in store - I’m just not making any promises. Our strategy is to release the Beta on 5 November, ensure that it’s stable and then roll out a heck of a lot of features in the weeks that follow.

We’ve really been busy trying to plan our architecture to ensure that we can scale the application to serve thousands of users, and also that we minimize any inconvenience to our Alpha testers as we migrate them the Beta platform.

That’s all from me this week. We’re trying to rotate the blogging between everyone in the team, so expect Peter, Stefan, Brent & David to post here on a weekly basis!

Thanks again for all the support!

Regards

Vinny Lingham
CEO, Synthasite

SynthaSite is hosted on Amazon’s EC2 utility computing infrastructure; which supplies Linux Virtual Machine building blocks you can “rent” by the hour. Using these; its possible to build an on demand scaling system; without the upfront cost & effort involved in setting up your own data center.

Experiencing heavy load for a few hours? Just fire up another 2 webservers. Load gone? Shut them down again. Total cost - a few dollars.

Whilst the Amazon infrastructure is excellent, the management tools are all command line based, and can be a bit daunting to the uninitiated.

Several third party tools have emerged to create a friendlier interface to EC2. Of these, our favourites are the Firefox plugins EC2UI & S3Fox, and RightScale’s EC2 web interface.

RightScale’s interface is a great place to get started. Their logical interface is full of tips & prompts on what to do next; so you can get your first EC2 instance up and running in almost no time.

Far from being just a simple tool to get you going; RightScale grows with you to become your “EC2 server farm” dashboard. They provide a number of standard building blocks that every scalable solution is going to need - Replicated MySQL servers, DNS & load-balancing blocks for running multiple webservers, auto-scaling - launching / terminating instances based on load triggers.

Further, for those times when the standard building blocks aren’t enough, Michael, Thorsten & team are also available to help with architecture advice & custom solutions. In our dealings with them we’ve found them extremely knowledgeable, helpful and professional - a pleasure to work with.

So, if you’re thinking of using EC2 for your next scalable web app; have a look at RightScale and see if you can’t shortcut the process of turning a bunch of VMs into a workable, scalable system.