Building Castles in the Clouds
'Cloud Computing' is an oft-heard buzzword lately - the premise is that instead of having "real" servers in a colocation facility somewhere, these servers are virtualized, theoretically allowing for agile development, rapid deployment and retirement, easy scaling and significant reductions in cost.
But how many folks are actually taking this beyond the theory? In this session, we'll discuss the basics of cloud computing, and then focus specifically on computing within the Amazon EC2 Elastic Computing Cloud. We'll cover some of the bigger pitfalls and gotchas, and examine the down-and-dirty real-world details of migrating a large, heavily trafficked Drupal-based website out of a regular colocation facility and into the EC2 cloud. Topics covered will include working day-to-day within the cloud environment, building custom machine images, scaling Apache and MySQL, storage and bandwidth considerations, performance metrics, load balancing and auto-scaling. You'll also hear opinions on why this technology is so awesome, and where we think it's going next.
Drew Smith is a longtime Linux network administrator, technology fetishist, security and privacy advocate, futurist and technological nomad. When not riding his bike around or making music, he can usually be found geeking at home aboard 'Tie Fighter', his 39-foot sailing trimaran.
