Taking Advantage of the Cloud

Facilitated by Ryan Ozimek, PICnet

Ryan will show examples and provide how-to's for nonprofit organizations connecting their online communications to the cloud.

Session Notes

Non-profit Software Development Summit legaltorrents.com - source and host open licensed media nonprofitsoapbox.com

definition of "the cloud"

success stories

what can we do as a collective group to identify examples

pricing / costs virtual private cloud

google app engine - stories from using the cloud

Joyent (Based in Marin) - offer slices of Solaris. dial to order disk, storage and memory, offer network attached storage

250k unique visitors / mo 2-3 million pages per day / 20 TB of content / month

Cloud is a marketing term. Cloud is out of sight, out of mind

The less you have to worry about it, the more pure cloud it is.

Differences between EC2 and GAE.

GAE - Deployment is trivial. Scaling is a non-issue. There are limitations and constraints in how you build your app, but that ensures that the apps can scale.

Provisioning is transparent. Scalability is inherent.

EC2 is a cloud platform on which you could build

Pay-as-you-go. If you have a big fundraising campaign and expect a lot of traffic to your site, you can use EC2 to fire up new machines to increase capacity to handle the additional load.

Low traffic, dynamic resource allocation over time.