The document discusses the transition of LouderVoice, a customer reviews SaaS company, to cloud hosting on Amazon Web Services (AWS). It outlines LouderVoice's current architecture using AWS services like EC2, EBS, RDS, Cloudfront and S3. It also introduces HushVine, a social TV platform being built using Node.js, MongoDB, and streaming APIs on AWS and other cloud platforms. Key points discussed include scaling challenges, costs considerations, and evaluating Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) vs Platform as a Service (PaaS) models.

1. Living in the Cloud
Conor O'Neill
CEO LouderVoice & Co-Founder HushVine

2. Introduction
1. Me
2. History of LouderVoice
3. Transition to Cloud
4. Current Model
5. Scaling
6. Issues
7. Outline of HushVine
8. Node.js + MongoDB
9. Iaas vs PaaS
10. What's Next?
11. Q&A

3. Me - 20 yrs Technology Management
○ 1990s : S3/Philips, Integral Design
○ Telecoms and then Digital TV
○ 2002 : Advanticus
○ Digital Convergence
○ 2003 - 2006 : EMC
○ Prof Services around SRM
○ 2006-2006 : McAfee
○ Localisation
○ 2006 -Now : LouderVoice
○ Customer Reviews SaaS
○ 2011-Now : HushVine
○ Social TV on a Second Screen

4. History of LouderVoice
2005 - We should do a startup
2006 - Build blog reviews aggregation platform
2007 - Expand to non-blogs and Twitter
2008 - Build first API for Business Customer
2009 - Build Widget-based solution
2010 - Move entirely to B2B Model
2011 - Scale
2012 - Grow via Channel and L10N

5. What it Looks Like 1

6. What it Looks Like 2

7. What it Looks Like 3

8. LAMP
Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP/Perl/Python
LouderVoice =
NGINX
Apache mod_wsgi
MySQL
Python
Django
Memcached

9. LouderVoice Architecture
NGINX Simple Load Balancer
Content Distribution
Network
Application Application Application
Server = Apache Server = Apache Server = Apache
+ Django + + Django + + Django +
Python Python Python
MySQL Solr Search Memcached

10. Transition to Cloud
Pre-Launch = Simple Shared Hosting
2006 - 2007 = Low-end VPS
2007 - 2009 = Dedicated Softlayer Servers
2009 - Now = 99% Amazon AWS
2011 - Now = Some CloudFoundry, Heroku
and Nodejitsu

11. Current AWS Setup
A number of generic small EC2 Instances
1.7GB Memory
1 Compute Unit
All running Ubuntu 10.04LTS Linux
EBS for all live data
RDS for MySQL
Cloudfront for CDN
S3 for backup
Elastic IP for easy switchover

12. LouderVoice on AWS
Elastic IP
All Static Content on
NGINX on EC2 instance
Cloudfront
Application Application Application
Server on EC2 Server on EC2 Server on EC2
with Data on with Data on with Data on
EBS EBS EBS Backups on S3
Solr Search on EC2 with Memcached on EC2 with
MySQL on RDS
Data on EBS Data on EBS

13. How it all Works
Client site with
LouderVoice Widget code, CSS, Content searched usingSolr
Code running on images delivered by
one or more of Cloudfront CDN for
their web-pages geographic
performance
Client site with Data cached
LouderVoice using
Code running on Memcached for
one or more of performance
their web-pages
Required content etc
Client site with retrieved from App
LouderVoice Servers Reviews/Users/etc
Code running on stored/retrieved from
one or more of MySQL
their web-pages

14. Other Services
1. DNSMadeEasy
2. AuthSMTP
3. Pingdom
4. Google Apps for my Domain
5. WordPress
6. GitHub
7. Redmine
8. Bit.ly
9. Facebook APIs
10. Twitter APIs

15. Management Tools
1. AWS Console
2. Elasticfox
3. Cloudberry Explorer
4. Digital Mines + Cloud Vertical
5. Cloudkick
6. Boto
7. Putty SSH and CLIs

16. Scaling
1. Pre-Optimisation is root of all evil
2. Think about best/worst case scenario
3. But do not build it day 1
4. Don't re-invent wheel
5. Avoid lock-in technologies
6. Use Open Source as much as possible
7. You probably won't be Facebook
8. Scale vs Time vs Skills vs Money
9. How fast is fast enough?

17. Words of Warning
1. Build to your budget not perfection
2. Do you have the skills or can you pay for
them?
3. It's not cheaper than traditional hosting
4. You get Enterprise Functionality for Small
Biz
5. Servers disappear, DBs get corrupted,
backups fail, Amazon has outages. Plan?
6. How mission critical is your service/site?
7. How much downtime can you accept?

18. Costs
1. Basic Server costs
2. Reserved Instances
3. Database, CDN, EIP, Multi-AZ etc etc
4. All those other services
5. People cost - who will manage?

19. Outline of HushVine
1. Original idea
a. A power-user filtering Twitter client
b. Show you all the Tweets you want, hide all the noise
2. Target market narrowed to Social TV
watching e.g. #xfactor #apprentice
3. Creating unique second screen Social TV
Platform for Tablet and Smartphone
4. Initially Twitter, then Facebook
5. Back-end = Cloud
6. Front-end = Cross-Platform Mobile

20. HushVine Outline 2

21. HushVine Outline 3

22. HushVine Architecture
HushVine Tablet, Mobile and Web Apps. Cross-platform using HTML5+CSS3+JS and
FeedHenry (or similar)
HushVine API HushVine Dashboards and Analytics
Node.js + Express = Filtering and Data
Crunching Platform
MongoDB NoSQL Database
Hadoop Non-realtime Data Processing
Twitter Streaming API delivering realtime sub-set of firehose

23. Node.js and MongoDB
1. Hot Tech
2. Node.js
a. Server Side JavaScript
b. Uses Google Chrome V8 Engine
c. Massive performance
d. Widely understood programming language
3. MongoDB
a. NoSQL
b. Document-based DB
c. Massive performance and scalability
4. 3000 X-Factor Tweets per minute
a. CPU barely ticking over

24. IaaS vs PaaS
● IaaS
○ Infrastruture as a Service
○ e.g. Amazon AWS, Rackspace
○ You design you architecture
○ No hand-holding, it's all on you
○ Ultimate in flexibility
● PaaS
○ Platform as a Service
○ e.g. Cloud Foundry, Heroku etc
○ You fit within a particular architecture
○ Get best-practices built-in
○ Reduces your management overheads

25. CloudFoundry PaaS
● No lock-in, multiple
Clouds
● Partnered with
FeedHenry
● VMware
● Spring, Ruby on
Rails, Ruby and
Sinatra, Node.js,
Grails

26. What's Next
1. More automation and tools built-in to AWS
2. Look at more automatic scaling
3. Re-evaluate cost-benefit of more robustness
4. Ever-reducing prices
5. Cost Analysis and tuning
6. Proper evaluation of Microsoft Azure
7. Move some aspects to CloudFoundry
8. Small Business friendly Cloud Offerings

27. Q&A
Questions?