This is one. Unlike a lot of existing systems that are "implicit" clusters (e.g., nginx+mongrels, HW load balancer over nginxs over mongrels, etc in that vein), Fuzed is an "explicit" cluster.
So it does things that normal routing doesn't do very well:
1. Fuzed restarts rack processes that become unresponsive or die suddenly as part of its normal operation.
2. Fuzed's dispatcher actually knows when your rack instances are busy and when they aren't. It won't route requests to a busy instance. This ends up being a very good scheduling algorithm for things like rails because of the variable return times.
3. Fuzed clusters reqire almost 0 configuration, they need to be able to do a DNS lookup to a master node, and that's pretty much it.
4. Fuzed can simultaneously host multiple versions of a site and monitor all of them individually OR in groups. Powerset uses the api-mode to host multiple versions of software as we roll out or do performance testing on new hardware or software.
5. Fuzed natively supports multiple frontends that serve out over the same hardware. Usually traditional approaches don't scale horizontally over this dimension without cloning configurations.
I could name some other features that normal clustering approaches need a lot of secondary software to achieve, but I've got a blog post coming up soon that should go over it in more detail.
So it does things that normal routing doesn't do very well:
1. Fuzed restarts rack processes that become unresponsive or die suddenly as part of its normal operation.
2. Fuzed's dispatcher actually knows when your rack instances are busy and when they aren't. It won't route requests to a busy instance. This ends up being a very good scheduling algorithm for things like rails because of the variable return times.
3. Fuzed clusters reqire almost 0 configuration, they need to be able to do a DNS lookup to a master node, and that's pretty much it.
4. Fuzed can simultaneously host multiple versions of a site and monitor all of them individually OR in groups. Powerset uses the api-mode to host multiple versions of software as we roll out or do performance testing on new hardware or software.
5. Fuzed natively supports multiple frontends that serve out over the same hardware. Usually traditional approaches don't scale horizontally over this dimension without cloning configurations.
I could name some other features that normal clustering approaches need a lot of secondary software to achieve, but I've got a blog post coming up soon that should go over it in more detail.