2 Years Later:Loving and Hating the Cloud

Justin Huff

justin@picnik.com@jjhuff

Picnik?!

Using AWS for 2 years

In production 1½ years

Flexibility

(We love it!)

Buy hardware for average capacity Auto-scale out into the cloud

• Capacity management– Easily repurpose existing resources

• Hardware purchasing– Buy hardware in batches– Less wasted rack space– Better deals!

Storage

Our 4-Step Process

1. Move 'old' files to S3

2. Put some newly created files on S3

3. All files go to S3

4. Profit!

Storage #fail

• Most of our files are short lived

• We didn't have a good deletion process in place.

– Lots of unused files == really expensive

What did we do?

We ignored it.

We had other stuff to do!

(and limited humans)

Until it got too expensive

Lessons

(Your Network)

(Your NEW Network)

Clouds Are

Distributed Systems!

• Are bigger than you!

• Come with some complications

They:

• #fail

• Hard Debugging

Be Ready For:

Clouds are Flexible

That's the point!

Just don't get lazy

:)

Thank you!

http://opte.org/maps/http://www.flickr.com/photos/rscottjones/3068940482http://www.flickr.com/photos/cdm/147947664/http://www.flickr.com/photos/28481088@N00/2631082044/

6/22/09 02:43 PM