Blossom has moved to the cloud

For the past month, Blossom has been testing virtual servers from Amazon Web Services. Our experience has been very positive and so we have moved all our spiders and search servers to the cloud. Virtual servers provide several benefits, including excellent reliability and easy scaling.

Since its inception, Blossom has used redundant servers to achieve high reliability. For the past ten years that has worked well as Blossom Search has never been completely offline. When a server went down, others would pick up the search traffic. To minimize hardware failure, we replaced server hardware on average every two years.

Using virtual servers eliminates our need to replace hardware as the underlying infrastructure is maintained by the service provider, in this case Amazon. In addition, because the capability of the hardware is specified in software, we can expand server capacity quickly without interruption of service. 

If you monitor Blossom's spider, you will now find that all requests appear to come from IP address 54.201.166.110. Our search servers are now all also behind a single gateway at 54.201.121.129. With the new configuration, mirroring is now continuous, so you won't find any update delays as in the past and there is no longer any need to test on "search1.blossom.com". Your changes should be visible in just a few seconds on all servers.

Movement to the cloud has been a major change for us. Although we have spent many hours testing, there is always a chance we've overlooked something. Please send us email if you find anything amiss.