This chassis houses up to 8 processing nodes. Each node is roughly equivilent to 30 elastic compute units. You can scale as needed by building and slotting more nodes into the chassis. Candidates for these nodes includes: app servers of any kind, ssl termination/reverse proxies, cache servers, distributed/concurrent processing, cron jobs, etc.
Barebone:
- 1x Supermicro 5038ML-H8TRF(http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/3U/5038/SYS-5038ML-H8TRF.cfm) $3750
Per node (up to 8):