Spouting Shite

Speed of thought…Cloud Computing helps lower the time to market.

My day job is managing the worldwide network of spam filtering servers used to provide the EmailCloud service. I have been managing email servers for almost ten years and have quite a bit of experience in the area. Recently I have been using several cloud computing providers to host parts of the network. This has helped me to add scalability, fail over and add geographical load balancing. These are great things, but, one of the most exciting aspects of this new technology is the speed that it allows me to design, prototype, test and deploy new technology.

In the past the process was quite a bit more time consuming. The steps were something like  this:

1. Find some hardware.  I am lucky enough to have quite a bit of test hardware  in the office…we have  a suite of around five servers that are used for testing. The problem is that they are regularly dismantled and the parts used in lots of ways. Finding hardware is easy…but it takes time to build it.
2. Install an OS. For the testing to be perfect it is a good idea to use the same OS the deployment environment.
3. Replicate the existing production environment. This step can take ages…installing all the correct OS modules, perl modules and application software.
4. Write your code and test it. 
5. Deploy….
   
6. tidy up and put the server back on the shelf.

The whole process can take days of work…but due to the demands of small business it can take weeks to get it done….breaking the line of thought.

Using the AWS and S3 service I have been able to lower time from conception to deployment from months to perhaps hours. Now, firing up an instance and testing some crazy idea only takes minutes and costs peanuts. Once tested it can be built into a custom image and then fired up in bulk for deployment….moving the IP addresses from an old bank of now obsolete servers is the last step to move traffic across before shutting down the old servers.