Why all the fuss about cloud computing?

Cloud computing lets you:

• Offer on-demand services without paying anything upfront
  
• Save money in the face of rapidly changing demands for server resources
  
• Launch startups without having any infrastructure or system administrators
  
• Test code in realistic scenarios, while providing a higher level of safety
  

In short, cloud computing is forever changing the tech industry, and if you haven't felt its impact yet (and you probably have, at least through low-cost tech startups that rely on cloud computing!), then chances are you will. If not in your current job, then in your next one, or in a startup you launch on your own.

In this presentation, SocialMedia.com's chief infrastructure engineer Mike Conigliaro will walk you through what cloud computing is, why it's important, and how you can use it to build highly scalable, cost-effective, agile infrastructure.

Background:

SocialMedia has moved their entire ad serving infrastructure into the cloud. In a matter of minutes, and at the press of a button, any cluster can be scaled up by a factor of 10x, which enables SocialMedia to meet rapidly changing requirements for serving capacity, while paying only for the actual demand. This has resulted in savings of 70% compared to the former traditional infrastructure.

Developers deploy to production by first pushing code to a special staging branch, which triggers automatic creation of a massive mirror production environment, replicated with real data from production. The full suite of unit, integration, and system tests is run on this virtual environment, and the whole environment is destroyed moments after completion, whereupon code is incrementally rolled out across production.

This deployment scheme is simply not cost effective without cloud resources, and offers an unprecedented degree of safety and robustness.

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Free pizza and drinks! Come hungry!