Is your system small, medium, large, or super-size? Is traffic on it's way up?

Architecture patterns and structures that work at one scale seldom work across all of them. A communication style that's appropriate for small websites will probably fail badly if you apply it to world-wide networks of computers. Likewise, structures that work for large-scale systems are probably too complex and expensive to be worth it for small sites.

In this talk, Michael will discuss the notion of "design envelopes" for architectures. He will explore several common scaling strategies and map them to different system scales.

During this session, Michael will present reference architectures for systems at a variety of scales. It's sometimes possible to scale smoothly from range to range, but it can be extremely disruptive if you don't plan for it.

Along the way, he'll also address the different dimensions of scalability problems: traffic, content, data volume, and operations.

Cloud computing is taking the world by storm. Amazon's Web Services, EC2, and S3 provide completely virtual infrastructure, letting startup and existing companies create sites and web applications faster than ever before.

In this session, Michael will use cloud computing to create and deploy a fully-functional web site. You will learn how to create and run your own virtual infrastructure in the clouds.

It used to take weeks and months to stand up a new site. You had to buy hardware, rent (or build) space, rack, stack, and cable it, and then you'd finally get to start installing operating systems, databases, and so on.

These days, none of that is necessary. You can run a real business on the net without ever owning anything. Best of all, you can be up and running in a single day.

A day? Trivial you say? OK, we'll make it an hour and a half, with time for questions.

Servers, storage, networking, backups... they're all vanishing into the "clouds". Cloud Computing is the emerging architecture for massive, scalable infrastructure that your company doesn't have to own or operate.

In this session, Michael will discuss the ingredients of real cloud computing and how you can apply it to your applications. He will show several architectures and discuss applications that fit each of these models. Finally, he will also talk about some of the pitfalls and problems that cloud computing customers can encounter.

The term "Cloud Computing" can be applied to everything from Software-as-a-Service (formerly known as Application Service Provider) to virtual infrastructure, grid computing, and even remote backup services. Some of these make sense, but some are just bandwagon-jumping and buzzword bingo.

From the "zero servers" web startup to the corporate IT department battling server-sprawl, cloud computing has many manifestations. This session will differentiate among the various types of cloud computing and describe applicable use cases.