Cloud For Startups: Understanding Cloud technologies by Mr. Vijay Rayapati, CEO of Minjar. Having taken the plunge of being an entrepreneur and starting a start-up business, it is likely that you are faced with the challenge of which technology to use. In the current market, the only certainty is that you do need to be online, somehow. “TO BE OR NOT TO BE – ON THE CLOUD” will be your next primary question. How can start-ups leverage cloud technologies? How does the cloud work in reality? What is a multi-tenant application? How does one build applications that can be easily scaled up on the cloud? How does one migrate a website to a cloud? Does cloud computing allow start-ups to run as efficiently and effectively as possible? How does one take advantage of the power of the cloud for one’s business? What are the key factors to consider when evaluating a potential move to the Cloud?

1. Cloud Computing for Startups
#4startups, NSRCEL@IIM Bangalore
Vijay Rayapati
CEO at Minjar

2. What is common among them?

3. Cloud Computing?

4. Cloud Computing – Simplified IT
Image credit: wikipedia

5. Why Cloud for Startups?
Start small – no CAPEX and pay as you go
Scale fast – zero users to million in hours
Flexibility – choice of infrastructure and
programmability
Think big – go global within minutes
Focus – Do what you do best instead of sys admin
tasks

6. Quick Look : Amazon Web Services

7. Quick Look : Windows Azure

8. Quick Look : PaaS

9. Signal vs Noise

10. Choosing a Cloud provider
Focus on application needs and business use cases
Go for reliability than fancy features
Native support for technology will be useful at times
Better to have a provider with a good community support
Use a service that can give you free tier – AWS, Azure, Google
etc
Don’t choose a provider because someone said it’s cool

11. How do I build a Cloud ready applications?

12. Best Practices
Choose what you know – technology, frameworks, libraries
Don’t build if you can reuse – lot of good stuff on github
Don’t over engineer your architecture and keep it simple as it evolves
Learn architecture best practices – infoq.com and highscalability.com
Learn about building multi-tenant applications – Data Security, SLA, Reliability,
Scaling
Performance tuning - focus on code first and config next

13. Best Practices
Try to use add-on services provided by platforms like object store, queuing etc
Decouple your application into different components
Cloud doesn’t solve bad architecture problems
Most of the good technical advice is free on web
Use community to filter choices – stackoverflow, quora, hackernews &
hackerstreet
There is no silver bullet to all problems in technology

14. How can I migrate an application to Cloud?

15. Cloud Migration
Start with your Dev/QA environment on Cloud
Learn basics about related to Compute, Storage, Networking and
Databases
Get comfortable and gain knowledge – just few days!
Move your application without major re-architecture – no fixed rules
Setup a good monitoring and backup solution
Automate common tasks and program your infrastructure for provisioning
Start re-architecting your application to take advantage of Cloud

16. How do I leverage Cloud for growth?

17. Best Practices
Customer experience is very important – focus on high availability and
reliability
Go global with distributed deployments based on use cases
Focus on leveraging CDNs and Caching heavily to scale
Use RDMS level read replicas to handle read traffic growth
Leverage NoSQL stores like DynamoDB or BigTable for high volume data
Use an auto-scaling infrastructure to handle spikes in traffic
Have a stand-by DR setup in another region of Cloud

18. Resources
AWS - http://aws.amazon.com/architecture/
Azure - http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/architecture/
Config Management – Chef, Puppet
APM – NewRelic, AppDynamics
LogManagement – SplunkStorm, Loggly
Monitoring – Pingdom, OpenSource tools
Backups – Use Cloud provider APIs for snapshots, Zmanda or StoreGrid
Email – SendGrid, PostMark, Sendy

19. How can I get best out of Cloud as a Startup?

20. There is no FREE lunch forever!

21. Startup Smartness
Choose a cloud provider with free tier
Most providers have a startup friendly programs – bizspark
Attend a conference or event hosted by provider to gain knowledge and $$
credits
If you are in an accelerator then most of them have tie-ups with cloud
providers
Write an email to their evangelists asking for startup freebies
Talk to friends in ecosystem and architects from Cloud providers for tech advice
And it’s worth paying for a good advice – get some help!

22. Web is your business so
be ready to pay!

23. Startup Smartness
Automate deployments & focus on continuous integration
Use right tools to troubleshoot issues i.e newrelic and pingdom
Learn best practices early on – web performance tuning
Leverage StackOverflow or Quora to gain knowledge
Do internal hackathons to fix your technical debt
Learn from tech events in local community
Automation helps you save time – you need every bit of it

24. Work Hard, Have Fun and
Make History
- amazon.com

25. Thank You - Q & A
Vijay Rayapati
CEO at Minjar
Twitter - @amnigos
Blog - http://www.amnigos.com
Github – https://github.com/amnigos