Hosting on the cloud vs. using the cloud
Until you’re about 20 you learn stuff all the time. Then you stop, and just recycle the same old junk again and again.
I’ve been hosting sites in the cloud – Amazon and Rackspace clouds – for a couple of year now, and I like being able to add and remove servers as needed but we haven’t been truely elastic.
And then our traffic increased. Lots. We had client sites getting 3, 4, even 300 times as many visitors and we’re on the cloud but we’re not using the cloud. This is important. Cloud computing looks like servers that are just cheaper and easer to create than physical servers. Anything easier than ten weeks of contracts, estimating traffic levels and a two week installation lead time and setup is easier… but it isn’t cloud and it isn’t elastic.
My mission, whether I choose it or not, is to create a completely elastic hosting configuration. Traffic goes up, so do the servers. It goes down. Servers do as well.
The key is use the cloud. Exploit the technology and don’t stick to using web servers in the way you’ve been using for the past 10 years (or more..!). Many companies I’ve spoken to use cloud and virtualisation technology simply to reduce their costs and make backup and recovery quicker, but this isn’t cloud.
Move static files to static servers.
All servers should be based on vanilla installations, with configuration at boot time so you can deploy changes quickly.
Build redundancy everywhere. If the servers are cheaper, have more of them.
