Presentation in NYC for Amazon Event

On October 19th, Paul Tepper Fisher and Rajiv Pant presented a case-study at the AWS Event in New York. Our presentation focused on the experiences of Wired.com and Reddit.com in using Amazon EC2 and S3. We have included a PDF version of our presentation, and will include a ScreenCast shortly.

One of the debunked myths we heard mentioned at the conference referred to the nature of the average company using AWS. Many assume that it is primarily small start-ups, with simpler infrastructures, that are most likely to leverage technology. Although newer companies are more likely to begin building an IT infrastructure in the cloud (compared with those who have already invested in a legacy infrastructure), there are in fact a significant number of larger enterprises that have migrated (or in the process of migrating) to a Cloud model.

Our presentation covered some of the pain-points in migrating a multi-layered architecture into EC2. One of the bigger take-away messages is that it is often a best practice to migrate in phases. This process is often made possible through the use of VPN, in order to merge a legacy IT infrastructure (and network) with the virtual instances in EC2. Amazon offers a service called VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) which simplifies a means for securely merging an internal and cloud-based network. In our presentation, we discussed how Reddit accomplished a similar goal through the use of OpenVPN (only because VPC was not yet available from Amazon).

Please feel free to view a slideshow of our presentation here.