Last day (17 Nov 2011) I went to AWS cloud tour India at Banglore. Though it was somewhat business centric, attending sessions of evangelists from aws was really great. Event started with the keynote by Werner Vogels. He explained the current state of cloud and some use cases of it. Also he explained some newly introduced features in AWS like instance status monitoring, Routes 53 and the CC2.8xlarge instance (which is ranked #42 of in top 500 supercomputers in the world).Architecturing for the cloud and Designing fault tolerant application on AWS was the most interesting sessions out there. Got some demonstration on automating scaling and monitoring.They explained how netflix uses aws building blocks for encoding and storing videos, which was somthing interesting. They essentially uses Spot instances which cuts the cost significantly. They capture the videos and sent them into a queue using SQS. The automated system will allocate instances from spot market on the availability basis, which will encode it and store them S3.Someother recommendations for high availabilty solutions was
- Use Elastic IP and Load balancers (ELB)
- Always keep replicas of instances and the data in different availability zones.
- Use EBS to store data and application so that we can take snapshots of data and application at anytime, store them in S3 and can be restored.
- Plan for failures.
Later some succesful customers of aws shared their experience with cloud and how they moved from traditional hosting to aws, etc.The program concluded with the closing keynote by Werner Vogels, where he explained how amazone.com moved to aws. It was really interesting to see amazon.com is just a consumer of aws. Overall the program was a nice experience and learned many things :)