Can someone clarify about cloud computing a bit?
For example with Amazon Ec2 and others, in their presentations they all say that you add more servers and spread load across servers, bla bla; but how is this done at webmaster’s end? For example I have a site with Apache PHP MySQL.
By adding more servers, will the added servers directly process the data of existent server or each server needs its own coding and adjustments in order to process parts of traffic, db queries, etc?
What I am asking is… will these servers know what their job is? Or is it just like buying new dedicated server that needs instructions?
Thank you.
EC2 supplies boxes. Lots of them. How they coordinate with each other to provide a service is up to you. There are plenty of tools, frameworks and techniques available to you, and which can be used in an EC2 environment, but they are largely out of scope for EC2.
Having said that, EC2 does provide some tools, such as SQS, EBS, SimpleDB, Elastic MapReduce and other that make it easier to leverage clusters of computers semi-transparently in solving certain kinds of problems. Also (if you were developing in Java) Elastic Beanstalk provides an auto-scaling application stack for applications bundled as WAR files.