1. TIKAL COMMUNITY event
1.10.09 CBI Center, Tel-Aviv
The Cloud Dilemma for
Developers – AWS Case Study
Dudi Landau
CTO
ClearForest
Hosted by Tikal. www.tikalk.com Cost-Benefit Open Source

2. Introduction
 Map of the world
 Why (should I care)?
 What is AWS?
 The road from the container to the cloud
 The “body and soul” architectural pattern
 The “Stem-Cell” architectural pattern
 Semantic Proxy
 Processing 11 million docs
 Things you’re not told ...
TIKAL COMMUNITY event 1.10.09 The Cloud Dilemma for Developers

3. Map of the world
• SaaS
• PaaS
• IaaS
• “well it is basically just a virtual machine, but elsewere on the clouds”
• (…and multithreading is normal programming with just threads &
locks)
• (… and JEE is JSE on a server)
•  Cloud Computing in general and IaaS in particular is a paradigm
shift!
• machines are created by a web-service programmatically!
TIKAL COMMUNITY event 1.10.09 The Cloud Dilemma for Developers

4. Why (should I care)?
• Moving from CAPEX to OPEX, pay as you go
• Ability to scale in time (and shrink back!)
• Cope with Slashdot effect
• HW resilience is not our problem anymore …
• But even the NLB becomes a machine!
• Story: Animoto , SmugMug
TIKAL COMMUNITY event 1.10.09 The Cloud Dilemma for Developers

5. What is AWS?
• S3 – Simple Storage Service
• EC2 – Elastic Compute Cloud
• AMI , Elastic IP
• EBS – Elastic Block Store
• SQS – Simple Queuing Service
• SimpleDB - …
• CloudFront – CDN service (of S3)
• Mechanical Turk
• The lock-in problem
TIKAL COMMUNITY event 1.10.09 The Cloud Dilemma for Developers

6. The road from the container to the cloud
• The container is “my world” (and I’m sharing it with other EARS/EJBs
…, deployment lingo)
• “The Server is mine” (but I’ll focus with the container I know …)
• Cluster for robustness
• True farm no n2 chattiness (the MemcacheD like)
• From imaging to virtualization
• Scale matters - Enterprise scale vs. Web Scale.
• Cloud Computing – machines are generated and destroyed
programmatically by an oversight control program
TIKAL COMMUNITY event 1.10.09 The Cloud Dilemma for Developers

7. The “body and soul” architectural pattern
TIKAL COMMUNITY event 1.10.09 The Cloud Dilemma for Developers

8. The “Stem-Cell” architectural pattern
TIKAL COMMUNITY event 1.10.09 The Cloud Dilemma for Developers

9. Semantic Proxy (logical)
DNS round robin and fail over
External Squid (incoming) Squid farm
Memcached farm
Storage
Nodes
SP Logic
SP Logic
Internal Squid (outgoing) Squid farm
Web
OpenCalais
TIKAL COMMUNITY event 1.10.09 The Cloud Dilemma for Developers

10. Semantic Proxy
DNS round robin and fail over
Squid root node
Squid root Squid root
Memcached
Squid farm
Memcached farm
process
SP node SP node SP node Squid
SP node
Web
SP logic
(Java/Tomcat)
OpenCalais
Memcached
process
Squid
TIKAL COMMUNITY event 1.10.09 The Cloud Dilemma for Developers

11. Processing 11 million docs
• Since you on compute time:
• Running a 1000 machines for an hour
Is the same as
• Running 10 machines for 100 hours
• Process control – the single machine doesn’t mater any more
you need to manage many of them they cannot be “spoiled”
TIKAL COMMUNITY event 1.10.09 The Cloud Dilemma for Developers

12. Things you’re not told ...
• You can easily spend 20k a month
• The machines are relatively week
• Virtualization doesn’t work well with I/O intensive loads
• Context switches and predictability issues
• Bigger instances are better (why?)
• Need (some) IT/System aware developers
• Design for big from start (at a minimum keep non linear
scalability areas isolated and known).
TIKAL COMMUNITY event 1.10.09 The Cloud Dilemma for Developers

13. Q&A
(1 slide and we’re done …)
TIKAL COMMUNITY event 1.10.09 The Cloud Dilemma for Developers

14. Bottom Line
• Cloud Computing is here to stay
• One needs to know when applicable and when not
• Change is the only constant (unless you’re working in Cobol)
TIKAL COMMUNITY event 1.10.09 The Cloud Dilemma for Developers