It's Not Always Sunny in the Clouds

At RailsConf last week I gave a talk called "It's Not Always Sunny in the Clouds" where I shared all of our lessons learned with OtherInbox and cloud computing.  I tried my best to go beyond the hype and talk about our real world experiences.  The slides are below, but here's the raw list of lessons:

• “Everything needs to be automated”
  


• Autoscaling is the easiest part


• Think carefully about credential management


• You really could use internal DNS


• It's maybe not that cheap


• Launching servers is not that fast


• You will become dependent on “glue” services


• You will depend on a distant faceless provider


• Use DVCS


• You will spend a lot of time on monitoring


• Your logs will runneth over


• Write lots of “in-process tests”


• Snapshots are slow


• Rails will be the least of your worries


• Cloud services involve subtle-yet-massive tradeoffs


• SQS guarantees delivery at least once


• Queue lengths inaccurate for <>
  
• SQS not necessarily FIFO


• So you may not want a cloud queue


• SimpleDB optimized for writes, not reads


• You must code defensively


• There are no good "cloud sandboxes"


• Pay attention to MySQL timeouts


• "User account management is -not- ideal."


• You are locked-in to your provider


• Relational DB may not be the best choice


• Is there a benefit?
  
  
  
  • Changes the way you write code
  
  
  • You can start right away
  
  
  • Pretty awesome redundancy
  
  
  
  

It's Not Always Sunny in the Clouds

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