Monday, May 11, 2009
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
View more presentations from subelsky.
Labels: cloud computing, gartner hype cycle, otherinbox, railsconf
