Architecting for the cloud

Cloud Computing has come of age and is now the platform of choice for many mainstream services and applications. Software companies no longer need to make a deep investment in order to prototype an idea. Instead, they can quickly and easily spin up infrastructure in the Cloud for their needs. Better yet, they pay a nominal fee for this flexibility. As a developer or architect that wants to leverage this opportunity, you will undoubtedly have questions. What does it take to architect a reliable, scalable Cloud-based service? How does this differ from datacenter-based architectures? Should I stick with one vendor or opt for a Hybrid Cloud? Are Cloud deployments secure? What challenges will I face in migrating my applications from my data center to the Cloud? What are key best practices, anti-patterns and gotchas? Come learn from pioneering practitioners.

Day of week:

Tuesday

Location:

Seacliff C/D

Host:

Sudhir Tonse

Presentations

Summly: An Award Winning Mobile App's Journey to the Cloud with Five-9s Availability on a Shoestring Budget

4:05pm - 4:55pm

By: Eugene Ciurana
Yahoo Engineering Senior Principal; Summly CTO

Summly became the topmost news app in 25 iOS markets worldwide in less than 3 weeks after launch and Yahoo! snapped its dev team to inject the development know-how into its own mobile operations. This presentation describes the steps that led to the app's inception, development, launch, and evolution. The talk will also dive into the architectural choices and servers configuration, database, and caching systems that enabled Summly to achieve Five-9-Availability with deployments across transcontinental availability zones.

Cloud Open Space

1:35pm - 2:25pm

By:

Build Your Own PaaS the Netflix Way!

11:45am - 12:35pm

By: Sudhir Tonse
‎Manager, Cloud Platform Engineering at Netflix

Amazon Web Services revolutionized the software hosting industry by inventing IaaS, Infrastructure-as-a-Service. IaaS offers fundamental pieces of hosted software infrastructure such as a block store, an object store, compute nodes, public-facing load balancers, and messaging. As revolutionary as this was, it was still fairly difficult for a developer or a small startup to build services on top of these fundamental building blocks. For example, AWS was designed for 2-tier web architectures, where a public-facing front-end server would talk directly to one of the AWS's database offerings. Modern web architectures employ multiple layers of servers (middle-tier) between the front-end and database servers, requiring services such as dynamic discovery. Modern web architectures often require other specialized services in the form of configuration, encryption, search, caching, log aggregation, monitoring & alerting, etc... In order to ease this initial burden on developers, several PAAS providers emerged in the early days, such as Heroku, DotCloud, etc... In a few cases, AWS has bridged the gap (e.g. search-as-a-service, EMR, etc...). Netflix is now offering another approach. It has open-sourced its PaaS components in order to allow any developer/startup to build his/their own PaaS. Attend this talk to learn more about Netflix's composable PaaS.

Presentations

How Zynga handles Monitoring at Scale in its hybrid zCloud

5:20pm - 6:10pm

By: Matt West
Engineer, Zynga Gaming Inc.

The advent and popularization of cloud computing has only helped spur creative explosions in web applications from e-commerce to social networking to gaming, however scaling these applications to meet the ever changing user demand can be a challenge.

Whether you are running a public or private cloud, one of the largest challenges you will face is monitoring your application's performance and underlying infrastructure to enable you to make cost effective business decisions in real time.

Come join in the discussion to learn how Zynga uses technologies like cloudstack, beanstalkd, gearman, mod_gearman, nagios, nagconf and other tools to monitor large web applications at scale deployed in the zCloud.

Architecting Organizations for the Cloud

10:30am - 11:20am

By: Sebastian Stadil
Founder of the Silicon Valley Cloud Computing Group, and Scalr

You're in IT. You work on cloud. You have two objectives: keeping your colleagues productive, and keeping your organization's data secure. But with your company's occasionally reckless "get-things-done" culture and Rogue IT, your job has gotten tricky at the very least. Architecting for the cloud isn't just about building apps that run on cloud, it's about adapting your organization to a dramatic change. In this packed talk in which you'll be taking notes non-stop, Scalr founder Sebastian Stadil distills his experience in:

Picking the right cloud, based on the strengths and weaknesses of EC2, GCE, OpenStack, the quality others, and your app
Leveraging the cloud you picked, so you get the ROI that got you here in the first place
Facing the deployment and administrative challenges with each

Comparing and Choosing Cloud Vendors; A Technology entrepreneur's experience

2:50pm - 3:40pm

By: Debu Panda
Product Management Leader , BMC Software

Startups have been blessed due to the Cloud Revolution with a multitude of choices; AWS, CloudFoundry, CloudBees, Google App Engine, OpenShift, Heroku and the recently announced, Oracle Java Cloud Service. While the choices are plenty, it does place a burden in terms of evaluating and picking the right solution for your startup needs. This talk covers a practitioner's experience evaluating and choosing Cloud Infrastructure and the challenges faced.

Debu will walk the participants through the use case of advertising and recommendation based platforms and how the right technological and architectural choices were made while selecting the appropriate cloud solution.