Building Scalable Applications In the Cloud: Reference Architecture and
Best Practices

With the growth and acceptance of the cloud as a viable production infrastructure, resources previously out of reach to all but the largest organizations have become available to any group regardless of size. This availability has enabled smaller organizations to develop massively scalable applications, some of which handle tens of millions of daily active users – a feat previously possible in only a small number of enterprise organizations.

In this white paper, we describe in detail three key areas you need to understand to successfully launch a scalable application in the cloud:

• The challenges of building scalable apps in the cloud
• Best practices for building a reference architecture
• How to set up the individual tiers in a multi-tiered architecture (app server, load balancer, DB)

RightScale has had a tremendous impact on reducing the time ShareThis spends building and managing our environments. We're using RightScale for implementing and managing our automated server builds, configuration management, and monitoring for development, QA, performance, and production environments. I would recommend it highly for others looking to get up and running on the cloud.

- Nanda Kishore, CTO, ShareThis