Whether you go with a cloud solution or not, one thing to remember is that the cloud does not give you automatic scalability. The cloud gives you options, not solutions, and in fact there are many good reasons to host your own (financial AND technical). You still have to put in effort to design a system that allows you to "just add more hardware". The cloud may or may not be part of your deployment strategy (don't forget about hybrid solutions!). Before even thinking about cloud hosting, you should make sure that:
- Everything in your system is automated. Learn to love buildout or become a master of shell scripts. Each piece of your system should go from nothing to everything by running one script. I mean everything.
- If manual intervention is needed, you should be able to trigger processes anytime, from anywhere, WITHOUT affecting the system. The last part is the hardest and most important. Do those backups cause your machine to crawl? Fix it! It's only a metter of time before a minion accidentally triggers it at peak time anyways. Oh, and if they do, do you have monitoring set up to take care of it automatically?
- Centralized monitoring and process management. This may be customized and it may not be. It must be there by default, on spin up of a new os.
- TODO: finish this + add some diagrams
The funny thing about cloud hosting is that it forces us to do what we should have been doing all along - automating everything! Good cloud strategy will translate to good data center strategy, but not vice versa.
Tools for automated deploy:
- Apache Libcloud Python API supports just about every provider out there. Intro slides from OSBridge
- Silver Lining
- TODO: add zopeskel once released
- SuseStudio allows you to create and save custom ISO's of SUSE OS. It's neat-o, and something that old schoolers will appreciate.