From Inception to Acquisition: One Startup's Journey through the Cloud

Part 1: The business plan

• Using open source as the root for everything (Selenium, MySQL, Ubuntu, etc)
• Traditional load testing assumes hardware is a scarce resource
• We challenged this thinking by leverage Amazon EC2
• Show early financial model that proved out business concept
• Show how cloud-based architecture leads directly to predictable finance models

Part 2: Launching thousands of machines

• Benchmarking different EC2 instance types
• Know your AWS account manager (and other ways to raise your EC2 instance capacity)
• Being a good cloud-neighbor
• Architecture tips for managing large EC2 deployments (ie: user-data, how to reduce bandwidth costs to S3, etc)

Part 3: Processing the data

• One size doesn’t fit all, use the right tool for the right job, and other important lessons
• Using colo MySQL, MySQL-on-EC2, and RDS – all at the same time
• Migrating from SimpleDB to RDS to RDS + S3 (flat HAR files) while still maintaining sanity
• Why it’s OK to get it wrong the first and even second time around

Part 4: Sleeping well at night

• Monitor everything (including monitor the monitoring!)
• Auto-heal your network when possible
• Using voice calls via Twillio to alert even the heaviest sleepers
• “Press 1 on your dial pad to launch more servers” and other ways to salvage “date night”