There is a lot of hype these day about being in “the cloud”. However, “the cloud” seems to mean a lot of different things. Tim O’Reilly sees three types of cloud computing.  His first type, utility computing, is the type I’m talking about here. 

Utility computing. Amazon’s success in providing virtual machine instances, storage, and computation at pay-as-you-go utility pricing was the breakthrough in this category, and now everyone wants to play. Developers, not end-users, are the target of this kind of cloud computing.

Launched in July 2002, Amazon Web Services provide online services for other web sites or client-side applications. Each individual product is interesting by itself, but all the services together made it just the solution we were looking for. In this and coming posts I will talk about our experiences with Amazon’s version of “the cloud”. The first service we started to use was Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2).

Each day more than 2000 users from all over the world register at Floorplanner.com. At this moment we have over 800.000 registered users in our database. A lot of these users visit the site on a regular basis, which generates a lot of traffic. To meet this demand, we had a couple of dedicated servers running. When the demand rised above a certain level, we’d add a new one to spread the load. As logical as it might sound, it is far from ideal.

It takes a lot of time to install, configure and maintain a server. Precious time you can’t spend on the development of your product. It doesn’t scale fast. For example: when you are featured on a big site that generates a lot of additional traffic, your servers will probably have a very hard time (or crash) and there is nothing you can do about it. Buying additional servers takes too much time. Another thing about buying servers is that it’s an investment you have to finance up front. You have to pay the full price for it, but in the beginning you’ll only use a small part of it’s capacities. Once you’ve spend the money on a server, you can’t spend it on anything else. And maybe the biggest issue we had with dedicated servers was that it is hardware, and hardware gets old very fast. After a while you’re stuck with an outdated server, that you (a) won’t replace because “it’s still doing something” or (b) costs time (= money) to migrate to another server. This means a higher risk for failure, or just more work.   

Now with the EC2 service life has gotten better. Sure, we still had to install everything on the virtual instance, but only the first time. Once you’ve done this, you can add additional instances with a click of a button (based on an image of the first instance). When traffic spikes you can add instances within minutes instead of days. The pay-as-you-go model keeps us from financing every server up front. And because it’s a virtual server, we don’t have to think about the hardware anymore. Just deploy it and get on with the fun stuff!