How to manage the power of thousand of computers to host and scale your web application? Big companies like Google or Amazon have spend 10 years to roll-out their own system built on top of thousand of commodity x86 PCs.

3Tera, a start-up from California solved the problem with AppLogic, an innovative and easy way to use grids to power your web application.

Scaling a web application is not easy, and generally hosting companies only provide classic environment like shared or dedicated hosting. When you want to scale, you generally have to roll out your own system out of dedicated servers and network appliances. That takes a lots of effort and lots of money to do it.

3Tera released their “Grid Operating System” primarily targetted to hosting companies to make the most of their grid. This system let users build their application infrastructure using an AJAX browser-based graphical interface and let them use grid power on-demand (watch the Flash demo).

AppLogic Screenshot

Every component — or virtual appliance — of AppLogic is built upon virtualization. Each of these virtual appliances are complete operating systems (Linux or Windows) with a full software stack running in a virtualized environment. AppLogic have components for firewalls, load balancers, web servers, application servers and databases. Components are assembled to create the network infrastructure suitable for your application. In AppLogic, your application and the infrastructure are mixed together to form only one big component that can be “instanciated” in the grid with on-demand power.

AppLogic Architecture

Explaining the whole concept is a bit complicated. Guys from Read/Write Web wrote a good article introducing 3Tera technology. If you want to go deeper into their technology, white papers are available for download.

UtilityServe is the first hosting company to provide AppLogic with a price starting as low as $99 per month. You grow on-demand and you pay only for what you use. You will be able to scale up or down your system on-demand, without manipulating any piece of hardware.

AppLogic is smart and 3Tera is definitely a company to keep watching.