Patent ID: 8412810

Claim:
A computer-implemented method comprising: detecting, at a computer, that a clustered computing application has been launched on a cluster of nodes, each node in the cluster being a virtual instance of a machine within a virtualization service, the clustered computing application comprising: a load balancing tier comprising a load balancer executing on a first node in the cluster, an application tier comprising an application server executing on a second node in the cluster, and a database tier comprising a database server executing on a third node in the cluster; monitoring status of the nodes in the cluster to detect availability of the database server within the virtualization service; in response to the detecting availability of the database server, issuing a notification message addressed to the second node executing the application server, the notification message including information for connecting to the database server and information for discovering nodes in the cluster; in response to detecting that all nodes in the application tier and the database tier have started configuring the load balancer, the load balancer to deliver messages to the second node executing the application server: detecting a request to change a size of the cluster; and performing the change in response to the request.