Wednesday 4 November 2009

Things learned at AWS Cloud for the Enterprise: London

The event was organised and funded by Amazon to market AWS to the enterprise and took place on Tuesday 3/11/09 in London. This is the list of points summarising what I learned. This list has been created by consolidating a bunch of Tweets fired off in the last hour or so.

  1. Paul Nasrat, Lead System Integrator at Guardian mentioned some of the tools and techniques used to develop and deploy a website to distribute content related to PMs expenses. Technologies also includeed InnoDB and Puppet. Puppet seems definitely a tool I should be looking at for developing an idea I have been having for some time.

  2. Bob Harris, CTO at Channel 4 did the best presentation of the day. The most interesting things he mentioned are:

    • Amz roadmap isn't public. He hopes one day it will be to help enterprises to plan ahead

    • Amz believes that Cloud computing is at the "peak of inflated expectations" http://is.gd/4Mo1F

    • Cloud is no silver bullet: in fact he only deploys web sites for content distribution (one of which is ScienceOfScams)

    • The way C4 managed legal issues around Data Protection is by having made an enterprise agreement with Amz covering all those issues

    • Myths around cloud (lack of security, low throughput, low reliability, low availability) are just myths - to his experience, anyway.

    • You need a techie and a credit card to get going on the Cloud. In fact, although CapEx is limited, he had to do initial investments to guarantee that AMIs being used for his deployments were up to his required standards (bottom line: it's not as simple as it seems)

    • Hybrid clouds are next in his pipeline, with the intent of overcoming issues around deployment of enterprise applications in the public cloud.

  3. There were, in total, 4 Amazon customers' presentations/case studies. Yet again all falling in one of the "number crunching" and "glorified web hosting" categories. (That is, I have yet to see a proper enterprise app making best use of the whole set of services and API access that Amazon uses)

  4. Amazon took three years to push in anger the deployment of his retail stack (the book store and the reseller site) on the Cloud. This, to me, it's rather obvious as only recently AWS has reached a level of maturity and a set of functionalities that guarantees a certain success. They have currently migrated about 7% of their applications.

  5. Simone Brunozzi (@simon on Twitter) - Technical Evangelist at AWS - presented an interesting summary of the things to take into account when architecting apps to be deployed on Cloud (see here). In a nutshell:

    • Design for failure: apps should be written with failure in mind. Plan for when the app fails (not *if*)

    • Loosed coupling sets you free: loose coupling improves resiliency (incidentally any new app developed at Amazon is exposed as a service

    • Design for dynamism: leverage the cloud elasticity by making no assumptions on the location, health and configuration of the apps and it's dependencies should be made when the app is developed (note to self: should start making use of user data)

    • Security is everywhere: think of security constraints at every level of the stack, OS, network, application (some of these are facilitated by the Amazon infrastructure)

    • Don't fear constraints: think laterally on how to overcome constraints - does your app need huge amount of RAM? consider distribution across instances...

    • Many storage options: one size doesn't fit all for storage, choose the one right for the type of application needed (see also One Size Doesn't Fit All, also via @simon)

    • AWS ecosystem and community: re-use the expertise available in the community and ecosystem of applications both in the open-source and paid-for worlds.

PS: within the context of this post "the Cloud" is actually "the Amazon Cloud"

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