Cloud Best Practices

Business Benefits of Cloud:

Almost zero upfront infrastructure investment

Just-in-time infrastructure

More efficient resource utilization.

Usage-based costing

Reduced time to market

Technical benefits of Cloud

Automation - "Scriptable Infrastructire". Infrastructure architect positions are dieing. Rather software architect postions are needed across industry who knows to script infrastructure.

Auto-scaling

Proactive Scaling

More efficient Development lifecycle - software release cycle can be in every hour also if needed.

Improved Testability

Disaster Recovery and Business continuity

Overflow the traffic to the cloud.- Enhanced load balanced task is much easier now.

Design for Failure:

By being a pessimist think about creating recovery strategies during design time, which helps in designing 

an overall systems better.

 Assume -

`1. your hardware might fail.

 2. Some disaster might strike your application

 3. you may be slammed with more than expected no of requests/second/day

Netflix have developed their own software called simianarmy so that they can have systems like chaos monkey and Chaos Snail

chaos monkey can randomly delete instances from AWS platform. It can just go in and terminate instances.

Chaos Snail: designed to slow down their services

Netflix has designed their system for failure so that they can test their application much before than any catastrophic situation can hit them and they are unaware of how their application can handle or react to any failure. Great Practice.

If you are aware of any other leading companies using any specific cloud practice to handle the failure, please do share.