A few days after the joint Amazon/Zeus announcement that Amazon would be offering Zeus Simple Load Balancer as an EC2 option. This move, along with other recent Amazon announcement, addresses one of the common complaints I've heard about moving complex, multi-tier workloads into Amazon's EC2 computing environment.
Here's what Zeus has to say
Zeus Technology, a pure software-based application traffic management (Application Delivery Controller) company, announces today that Zeus Simple Load Balancer is now available on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). The move will give small to medium sized businesses access to Zeus’ affordable and easily deployed load balancing, enabling them to deliver fast, secure and available web applications. Zeus Traffic Manager has been available on Amazon EC2 since late 2009.
Using a simple web service interface, users can monitor and control web traffic to ensure online services perform well even during high peaks in web traffic. Zeus Simple Load Balancer is available at a cost of US $0.21 per hour1 with no upfront costs. Zeus solutions are 100 per cent software-based and require no capital outlay on proprietary hardware appliances.
Snapshot analysis
Amazon has been clearly listening both to its customers and to its competitors. This has caused the company to develop partnerships with a number of suppliers, including Zeus, that offered technology that addressed generic shortcomings of its EC2 computing environment.
In this case, adding Zeus Simple Load Balancer allows organizations to launch multiple instances of application components, such as application servers, database servers or other things, to address a high transaction load. This could mean the difference between market acceptance for an offering or its failure.
Zeus is also offering a
growth path to its more sophisticated load balancing and traffic
monitoring tools for those who out-grow the simple load balancer.