Geo-scaling Applications

Owned by Arnaud Lachaume (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Jul 07, 2017

This article explains how to use the Nex!™ PaaS to scale applications across multiple geographies and/or data centers. Note that geo-scaling is only available if Nex!™ has been deployed in multiple data center locations.




1 - Context

The Nex!™ PaaS can be deployed on multiple data center locations using the same IaaS provider (e.g. AWS) or different IaaS providers (e.g. AWS + Azure + On-Premise). Once setup in multiple data centers it becomes very easy to deploy applications and addons across multiple locations to increase the overall performance of your applications in multiple geographies.

2 - Geo-scaling applications

The easiest way to get started with geo-scaling is to use the nex-cli.

To know the list of regions you can deploy to simply run the following commands:

# List all the compute racks in all regions
nex-cli racks --type compute

+---------+-----+----------------+--------+---------+------------+-----+----------+--------------+---------------------+
|                                                    Compute Racks                                                     |
+---------+-----+----------------+--------+---------+------------+-----+----------+--------------+---------------------+
| TYPE    | ID  | REGION         | STACK  | STATUS  | IIP        | EIP | CAPACITY | MACHINE SIZE | MACHINE ID          |
+---------+-----+----------------+--------+---------+------------+-----+----------+--------------+---------------------+
| compute | 333 | ap-southeast-1 | docker | running | 10.30.3.145 | -   | 256/256  | m3.xlarge    | i-nb4nb777         |
| compute | 444 | ap-southeast-1 | docker | running | 10.30.3.111 | -   | 190/256  | m3.xlarge    | i-c1cxc47x         |
| compute | 555 | ap-southeast-2 | docker | running | 10.30.2.74  | -   | 255/256  | m3.xlarge    | i-er7e87e8         |
| compute | 666 | us-west-2      | docker | running | 10.30.3.41  | -   | 14/256   | m3.xlarge    | i-cvc4vc87         |
+---------+-----+----------------+--------+---------+------------+-----+----------+--------------+---------------------+


You can then configure your application or addons to be scaled in multiple regions using the following commands

Apps
# Configure your application to be deployed in all regions in a round
# robin fashion
nex-cli apps:update myapp --region-balancing=all

# Configure your application be scaled in specific regions
# and twice as much in us-west-2 than in ap-southeast-1
nex-cli apps:update myapp --region-balancing="ap-southeast-1=1,us-west-2=2"


Addons
# Configure your addon to be deployed in all regions in a round
# robin fashion
nex-cli addons:update myaddon --region-balancing=all

# Configure your addon be scaled in specific regions
# and twice as much in us-west-2 than in ap-southeast-1
nex-cli addons:update myaddon --region-balancing="ap-southeast-1=1,us-west-2=2"