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12.11.09
| What Have We Learned From A Year Of Cloud Computing? |
 By Mike Kavis
This month marks the first anniversary of when my startup, M-Dot Network, started building our enterprise solution on Amazon's cloud computing platform. So as I reflect on a year that went by in a blur, I decided to share my thoughts on what I learned about cloud computing.
Low startup costs
One of the first things we had to do after we defined our business architecture, was to create a demo that our CEO could take with him on the road. My engineer, who had never used Amazon AWS before, created an account using the company credit card, and quickly built a working model of how our system would work. He built both a web site and WAP interface that allowed a consumer to select online coupons and built a prototype of a store system that redeemed the coupon by calling our redemption engine in the cloud. The process took about 2 weeks and our IT costs for the month (excluding labor) was $86. Our CEO could now go on the road and show potential customers and investors just how our system worked (or would work in the future). The wow factor of walking into a client site, having them pull up their cell phone or their browser and perform an end-to-end shopping experience that utilized the cloud live was huge. And we did it for under $100!!! In fact, the only hardware we have purchased to date is our netbooks.
Optimal R&D environment
In my post called Building Better Software in the Cloud I discussed how we were able to fire up many different configurations to prove out our architecture. In my previous jobs, we would normally either be told what hardware our target application would run on or we would have to take a best guess very early on because of the long procurement cycles that often took several months. Then when the hardware came it we hoped like hell that our projections were accurate. In the world of cloud computing, we were able to experiment with many different CPU and memory configurations and simply only paid for the time we spent using those virtual machines. After performing numerous tests with numerous configurations, we knew exactly what "hardware" we needed to get the job done. There is tremendous value in proving out your design before you buy your target architecture. For one, if the project ever got canned, you are not stuck with hardware. Second, you no longer need to guess what you need and risk buying too little or too much computing resources. The "Try before you buy" model is a key differentiator in my book!
Ability to perform huge performance tests
One of the most impressive experiences I had in my first year in the cloud was the massive performance test we performed with our testing as a service partner, SOASTA. As documented in a SOASTA press release, we were able to prove that our architecture could easily process one million concurrent transactions in 1/10th of a second! To perform this test, SOASTA fired up over 700 virtual servers to run their software and we fired up over 50. After the test we both quickly tore these servers down to "shut the meter off". A test like this is not even feasible in the on-premise world! This test was executed in one day. That means both companies fired up a combined 800+ servers, ran the test, and decommissioned the servers all in a day's work. We only paid for the time we used the servers. You simply just cannot do that on premise. What this means is that in the cloud, you have the ability to stress test your system and discover and fix your bottlenecks when running worst case scenarios before you go into production.
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
Mike Kavis is a veteran Chief Architect with over 23 years of IT experience including distributed computing, SOA, BPM, data warehouse, business intelligence, and enterprise architecture. Read Mike's blog at Enterprise Initiatives.
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