Answer

Summary

This FAQ provides answers to many questions regarding clustering Aspera on Demand products.

Load Balancing & Resilience

1. Does Aspera On Demand work with the AWS ELB for load balancing/auto failover?
   Currently AWS ELB (Elastic Load Balancing) only supports TCP based transfer protocols and therefore it cannot handle the Aspera FASP protocol.
2. Are there any issues with Aspera balancing/offering resilience in different Availability Zones and Regions?
   It is possible to load balance Aspera in mutiple zones and regions but not with ELB. Please see details below.
3. What options are available for balancing the transfer load and making Aspera on Demand resilient?
   Aspera on Demand products can be deployed in a cluster using Amazons Route 53 DNS round robin. The Aspera transfer platform on Azure has a purpose built cluster manager that leverages this round robin technique.

Scaling out

1. How does a clustered Aspera on Demand platform scale up and down?
   Aspera does not currently offer an out of the box cluster solution for cloud deployments. We are working on a solution and expect it to be available early next year. Currently manual provisioning and de-provisioning is required.
2. How does auto-scaling Aspera on Demand work?
   It is possible to configure the AWS Autoscale to provision and de-provision Aspera on Demand but some customizations are required. The AWS services team is available to discuss the customizations that they have created as part of an Aspera On Demand
3. How do clients address the Aspera on Demand cluster?
   The Aspera Cluster can be addressed by a single host name. The hostname and IP addresses are managed by the AWS route 53 DNS service.