You won’t have heard much from Hybrid Logic recently — now with an early stage tech company this can mean one of two things: either they’ve given up and gone home, or they’re mad busy innovating, building and shipping their product.
I’m pleased to report that in our case it’s the latter 
Hybrid Cluster has had an extraordinary year of development and we’re on the cusp of releasing some very exciting new features for the world to get to grips with. What we’ve done is nothing short of revolutionary — we’re changing the fundamental assumptions about how your servers can co-operate together, how applications and databases can scale, and how companies do business continuity planning across data centres.
In the “old world”, a server is seen as a single entity; one which has its own specific configuration, and which hosts a set of applications and databases. If you’re staying up-to-date with the industry, you’ll have virtualized that server and put its storage in a centralized storage system (a SAN, for example) — now that’s all very well, but the virtual server is still conceptually a single server and can still suffer from these three problems:
- Hardware and networks fail
- Servers get over-loaded when there are spikes in demand
- Users make mistakes
At Hybrid Logic it’s our mission to solve all three of these problems for your existing LAMP applications, and our software — available for license today — solves them by employing a fundamental paradigm shift in industry thinking.
Individual servers and storage systems should not be the unit of concern for you, the developer or administrator. Applications, databases and mailboxes should be — the servers should look after themselves.
Now, if you look a little further down the road, this is the way the industry’s moving — in cloud, the move from IaaS to PaaS is exactly this — developers and sysadmins should not have to think about individual server instances ever again. Their servers should form a cognizant co-operative group on their own. This is exactly what our software does — it transforms a bunch of dumb, commodity machines, connected by slow and unreliable network connections, into a loosely-coupled distributed cluster where the failure of an individual server or even an entire data centre is automatically healed so that the cluster carries on working — keeping your applications, databases and mailboxes online even in the face of catastrophic failure of an entire region.
I’m Luke, the CTO here at Hybrid Logic, and in the next few blog posts I’m going to give you a bit of insight into how we do it
Happy New Year!
Cheers,
Luke
When a site is about to be moved from one server to another, what happens internally is that requests for that site get “paused” by the distributed proxying layer which runs on top of the web and database servers. This pausing happens so that during the transfer of the site or database from one server to another, none of the requests return error messages — rather, the user just experiences a slow page load. The Load Balancing Diagram in the God Pod now shows a dotted line around a site when it is paused. This gives you a better insight into what’s happening within the cluster during the process of moving sites from one server to another to keep your servers healthy and balanced.