Electrosmart.Net

Scaling Apps with Cloud Computing

Panellists discuss the difficulties in creating and scaling applications in the cloud at the TechCrunch Cloud Computing Roundtable in March 2009, held in Mountain View, California

Scott Dietzen - Yahoo senior vice president of Communications Products, believes it is overly optimistic to expect one can just place legacy applications in the cloud and for them to work perfectly.

Werner Vogel - Amazon CTO, believes apps immediately need the same scaling capabilities as the platforms they exist on

Mike Schroepfer - VP of engineering at Facebook, explains how and why two different functions on Facebook may have a similar interface to the user but completely different back end infrastructure.

Source: ZDNet UK Videos

Key Points

What is the Reality of Applications Being Transferred to Cloud?

We are possibly being somewhat optimistic as to expecting that you can just take an application and put it into the cloud, or that all applications will end up in the cloud. For the vertical applications, there is a huge amount of work that goes into:

Linear Scalability
Healing nature of when disks and servers fail
Troubleshooting
Continuous change

These are hard issues to resolve.

If you are looking at a start up and looking for a software platform to run an application, cloud will be huge. There will be no need to worry about the logic that drives the user experience.

However, it is common for very different changes in application usage and access patterns that may drive changes in your core architecture.

For instance, according to Mike Schroepfer there is about a billion status updates on Facebook of a say 200 bytes per update and about a billion photos uploaded each month. The storage and access patterns of these are very very different. It would be crazy to put them on the same back end. Facebook has a completely engineered back end for each, highly optimized for the nature of the transaction, the cost and the service performance to the user. These models are distinctly different and require a different architecture model.

Verner Vogels – Amazon CTO. Applications developed for a platform each have different scalability needs. If we look at the Facebook application PlayFish – this Flash based game was developed specifically for the Facebook platform. Such a popular game – if you needed to design all the architecture needs for this game, it would never have been launched. As a business wanting to minimize risk in building infrastructure, you are better to go for PaaS otherwise it would never get off the ground.

Next: Google Apps