In a situation when vertical scaling isn’t flexible and horizontal is expensive the hybrid model comes to the rescue.
Introducing hybrid hosting model which allows to add scalability layer on top of any traditional magento hosting.
There is 2 key principles behind this diagram:
Focus on What Matters
The key idea behind this diagram is understanding of which part of magento actually requires scalability and the answer is obvious: store front;
Eliminate Complexity
For example: filesystem scalability can be very challenging to achieve, instead the problem was isolated at its origin by reducing significant amount of requests with CloudFront CDN. And it was very easy to achieve, because, unlike traditional CDN, CloudFront acts as a proxy, i.e. request assets from your traditional server only once and serves them from local cache.
As a result it allows to achieve high level of agility at very low cost, to survive during holidays/sales peaks and save the money other days.
Conclusion
In the next post I’ll show how easy it is to implement this model with Heroku (PaaS) and just any VPS as traditional hosting.
Stay tuned!