"Cloud computing" can be a terrific and economical way to develop and deliver web software systems. This presentation was written by John Repko, and delivered in a joint presentation with Amazon's Mike Culver.

1. Cloud Time
www.geocities.com/robbi01/creation.html
Amazon Web Services at Chemidex
April 30, 2008
© Copyright 2008 Chemidex LLC 1
Wednesday, February 18, 2009

2. ABOUT CHEMIDEX
• Vertical search engine
serving the Chemical
industry
• 70,000+ Users
• Millions of page-views
per month
• Rapid growth, and
positioning for even
more rapid growth
• Planning new
offerings, services and
markets...
Technology In Transition: How Do You Plan For Web-Scale Growth?
© Copyright 2008 Chemidex LLC 2
Wednesday, February 18, 2009

3. THE CHALLENGES OF A SUCCESSFUL WEB-ERA BUSINESS
• Planning and Managing Growth
Source: http://www.kfwimer.com/images/outgrown.jpg
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Wednesday, February 18, 2009

4. THE CHALLENGES OF A SUCCESSFUL WEB-ERA BUSINESS
• Managing Technology and Infrastructure
Sources: http://blog.litux.org/2007/05/02/im-in-ur-serverz, http://icanhascheezburger.com/
© Copyright 2008 Chemidex LLC 4
Wednesday, February 18, 2009

5. THE CHALLENGES OF A SUCCESSFUL WEB-ERA BUSINESS
• Controlling Expenses
Source: http://www.familycourtchronicles.com/philosophy/wasted/money-to-burn.jpg
© Copyright 2008 Chemidex LLC 5
Wednesday, February 18, 2009

6. AWS ANSWERS SOME FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
• How do we budget and plan hardware growth?
• How will we handle peak loads?
• How can we control costs as we grow?
• How can we get / keep a robust web offering?
• What do we do if our growth is 500% of what
we’re planning? (or 50%)?
© Copyright 2008 Chemidex LLC 6
Wednesday, February 18, 2009

7. THE SOLUTION: AMAZON WEB SERVICES AND “CLOUD COMPUTING”
• Cloud Computing doesn’t really look like
anything -- here’s why it matters
– Planning - no more HW or hosting center budgeting,
purchasing, installation, or support!
– Scalability - if we need 50 servers to handle demand,
we can have 50 servers - instantly
• Another Memberlink instance can be created from
scratch to handle demand in < 10 minutes
– Cost
• only buy capacity when we need it
• demos and new projects - interim hardware
• zero-cost (license fee) software stack
– Stability
• No downtime since we first went live (Jan ’08)
• Staging and transparent cutover
– Flexibility
“Cloud” Computing • Need a server = get a server: $0.10 / hour
• Need a GB = get a GB: $0.15/GB/month
© Copyright 2008 Chemidex LLC 7
Wednesday, February 18, 2009

8. COULD AWS WORK FOR YOU? HERE’S WHAT WE’VE HAD TO CONSIDER
• Platform
– Need open LAMP-like stack (Ruby on Rails, for us)
– Helpful to be comfortable with open source tools and technologies
– Build your platform, then save / clone your image
• Administration
– UNIX admin skills (still need SysAdmins, but their lives are a lot easier)
– Terrific Amazon toolkit for managing your environment - but
• Still have to manage your own scalability
– Uptime is generally GREAT, but
• Still need to be able to “Roll Your Own” backup to / recovery from S3
• Administration recipes getting much better
• Services firms springing up
• Community
– Big, active tech community
– Not a lot of books yet
– Lots of online materials
© Copyright 2008 Chemidex LLC 8
Wednesday, February 18, 2009

9. WHAT IT’S MEANT FOR US
• PLANNING...
– Hardware:
• EC2 = NO NEW SERVERS!
• Instantaneous Capacity
– Try SugarCRM as a Customer Service System - No Problem!
– Need a demo server for a day - No Problem!
– Want to experiment with parallel, scalable architectures - No Problem!
• Painless cutover - start a new server, and use dynamic DNS to point to it for
instantaneous cutover
– Storage:
• S3 = Economical Backup for Systems and Data
• Ability to take on business we might have declined in the past
• Easy backup and proven recovery for all digital assets
– Asynchronous messaging and flexible data architectures
• SQS in evaluation
• SimpleDB in evaluation
© Copyright 2008 Chemidex LLC 9
Wednesday, February 18, 2009

10. WHAT IT’S MEANT FOR US
• ...AND DELIVERY
– “Hardware”
• We started with a single small server on EC2
$2.40 bill determining if it would work for us
• Ran up a
• Today 3 servers preparing for production usage
• At any given time as many as a half-dozen more in evaluation
– “Storage”
• Regular nightly backups to S3
• Hoping for Persistent Storage when the beta opens
• Infinite drive space potential key for planning future offerings
– This is the future of scalable web offerings
– “Lock-in” through value delivery rather than proprietary rat-hole
• KEY consideration in the event of an acquisition
AWS Has Changed How We Plan, Deliver, and Roadmap Future Offerings
© Copyright 2008 Chemidex LLC 10
Wednesday, February 18, 2009

11. QUESTIONS?
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Wednesday, February 18, 2009