Startups In The Cloud

Start-ups & the Cloud! Adil Mohammed Co-founder

Factors crucial for a startup infrastructure

Advantages of the cloud for Startups (as compared to traditional systems)
Rapid deployment and configuration
Cost efficiency
Low upfront capital expenditure
Use it as you need it
Ease of scalability
Scalability & elasticity is key to cloud computing
Many tools available
Spending less time on infrastructure
Higher degree of reliability

Startups are ‘built to grow’, therefore require agile and scalable systems
Its all about delivery!
Startups have everything to lose in case of failed delivery
The internet has allowed small startups to ‘act big’ (a user doesn’t know how small or large a service is by just looking at the startup itself) – however this is only possible through having the supporting infrastructure to act big
Time to worry about the product
Startups are often a small group of people. Money and time are scarce. Not having to worry about speed of deployment (setup speed) and scalability is a great (competitive) advantage
Its what you been waiting for!

Scaling is a good dream as well as an absolute nightmare!

Animoto scaled from 25,000 to 250,000 users in 3 days
Animoto is an online video mixing utility
Run on Amazon Web Services
Make use of Queues to manage load to their render servers
25,000 to 250,000 users in 3 days
At peak, 20,000 new users per hour
50 to 4000 instances (servers) in 5 days
At peak, 40 new instances (servers) per hour
Info: RightScale Blog, AWS Blog

Animoto scaled from 25,000 to 250,000 users in 3 days Info: RightScale Blog, AWS Blog

Startups using the cloud

EnTrip is an online travel utility (currently pre-launch) aimed at streamlining the online travel experience
Started 6 months ago, running RoR, moved from single dedicated server to AWS in May 2008
Complex trip model demands high server side processing power & complex database searches put huge load on the DB Server
We use advanced caching strategies, but realise the need for hardware in order to scale
Noticed huge performance improvement after switching to computing cloud.
Ready to scale within our chosen architecture
Using AWS, we are doing what we otherwise could not have done easily or without large CapEx

Architecture Application MySQL Cluster App Server (EC2 Instance) App Server (EC2 Instance) MySQL Master (EC2 Instance) MySQL Slave (EC2 Instance) S3 (Data Storage, Backups, Images) App Server (EC2 Instance) Load Balancer (Nginx) App Server (EC2 Instance) App Server (EC2 Instance) App Server (EC2 Instance) MySQL Slave (EC2 Instance) Email Relay

Other services have entered the cloud computing ecosystem to help manage your systems

Other services have entered the cloud computing ecosystem to help manage your systems
Scalr is open source
Its a redundant self-curing and self-scaling environment
It works with AWS but the principle is relevant to cloud computing in general
Scalr is not the only software, there are others

How load is handled dynamically Yes Yes Control node keeps track of instances and their roles load level higher? Max no of instance Start new instance and configure farm load level Lower? Terminate one instance and configure farm Min instance running?

and for the app developers...

and for the app developers...
Specialised platforms – RoR, Python
Most of them aimed at app developers
Aimed at instant deployment
They take care of the infrastructure

Cloud computing has hugely contributed towards levelling the playing field between startups and Established online players

Thank You! Adil Mohammed [email_address]

http://blog.entrip.com	83
http://blog.sunmaistudios.com	68
http://www.webcloudworld.com	53
http://cloudfeed.net	35
http://feeds2.feedburner.com	25
http://www.slideshare.net	15
http://www.cloud24by7.com	11
http://feeds.feedburner.com	10
http://zhen.org	9
http://www.zhen.org	7
http://www.kunalmittal.com	1
http://onsaas.net	1
http://www.frank-ly.nl	1

Startups In The Cloud

by adilmd on Jul 17, 2008

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Startups In The Cloud — Presentation Transcript