Bootstrap and Transition, the advantages of cloud computing
March 18, 2009 – 8:09 pmI am speaking at the forthcoming CloudCamp event in Newcastle-upon-Tyne next week and I have decided to talk about the ‘bootstrap and Transition’ methodology that we used to get the emailcloud service off the ground. The talk will focus around why you don’t need to raise VC funding for your early stage startup and how you can use simple Cloud Computing principles to get your business off the ground and running.
The presentation brings you through how we started emailcloud and how within a few months we had 110 servers running the system. Cloud Computing gave us extreme scalability without any investment. It was cool to be able to scale at low cost but early on we realised that we had a technical problem when the number of servers on our network was increasing at a faster rate than our rate of sales. This would normally be a huge problem because we would have had to buy and provision copious amounts of hardware to handle the load while also working on refining our code….in our case all we needed to do was to fire up a few more instances from Amazon Web Services, basically throwing resources at the issue until we had the issue sorted.
If we were to use traditional hosting relationships we would have had to buy 120 servers at an average of £1,000 each…that is a huge amount of cash upfront…and we would have had to invest this before we had any customers! With AWS we only had a simple liability of $63,000.
The $63,000 bill was not actually needed because we used the powerful API at AWS to turn servers off when we didn’t need them…we worked out that we could turn off servers in the morning and the evening….leading to a 46% discount off our bills!
So, we have a system that costs us a fraction to run in comparison to others…happy days? Well, not really! Some people believe the scare stories and they get all hooked up about putting everything in the cloud…we lost customers because of this! So we moved our network from the cloud to our own data centres…basically transitioning our network in-house.
So, here we are! we have a company with thousands of paying users, using over 50 servers that we own outselves, all protected behind Juniper firewalls and cisco load blancers and using Foundry switches…and not a VC in sight!
You can download my full presentation here:
