The Hidden Lessons of Cloud Computing

While everyone has been loudly arguing the hype and kicking the tires, cloud computing has been quietly teaching us some valuable lessons. Which vendors or APIs succeed in the marketplace will be less interesting than the improved infrastructure, application architecture and even corporate IT deployments made possible by what we’ve learned.

In this talk I’ll cover what I learned from my work on the Amazon EC2 design team and how to broadly apply lessons including:

• Powerful services composed of primitives
• Mindset of “throw away” resources and “pay-as-you-go”
• Automation of everything: provisioning, deployment, application configuration