TLA Managers | 5/17/13 | Steve Stern

Building on Amazon Web Services

Getting the discussion started

What is AWS?

“Amazon Web Services offers a complete set of infrastructure and application services that enable you to run virtually everything in the cloud: from enterprise applications and big data projects to social games and mobile apps.”

Key Features

Pay for what you use, sort of

Fixed capital expenses become demand driven expenses

Grow and shrink as necessary

Short lead times for standard applications

What can you buy?Virtual Servers (Elastic Cloud) with or without pre-build app stacks / CPU or GPU computing

Storage (S3) & Archiving (Glacier)

Automated Build (Beanstalk)

Global Network / CDN (Cloudfront)

Load Balancing

Database Services (from MySQL & SQL Server to Big Data)

Virtual Private Clouds with VPNs

Distributed DNS (Route 53)

Message Queueing / Emain / Push / Transcoding

Front End / Back End / API

Built on AWS

Pinterest

Netflix

Flipboard

Use case: iPhone APP Hosting

EC2 for computing

S3 for storage

RDS for database

SimpleDB for basic queries

CloudFront as CDN

Simple Queue Services to distribute processing

Management

Is this the “End of IT”?

Finding the experts

Security, Reliability, etc.

Modeling Accountability and Responsibility

Is it really a Lego model?

The usual rules apply

Little stuff (e.g., stand up a server) is easy

Big stuff is hard (e.g., clusters of distributed servers connected to databases with multiple points of fault tolerance)

There are models that are almost what you want

Parts are “mature”, but it’s always in flux