This panel is about building a perfect hosting for web apps. The panel is chaired by Rohit Sharma, an independent investor. The panel members are James Lindenbaum of Heroku, David Lipscomb of Netsuite, Lew Moorman from Rackspace, Matt Mullenweg from WordPress and Javier Soltero of Springsource. Some of the takeaways from this panel are
- Rackspace manages 50000 servers for their customers
- There are 31000 applications running on Heroku
- Matt Mullenweg says having one provider is risky
- The usage jumped significantly when WordPress started using CDN. They use CDN for static files, Javascript, etc..
- Matt Mullenweg says buying servers was the dumbest thing
they did in their existence. Buying infrastructure doesn’t provide
utility - A well architected multi-tenant system will appear to be unique for customers but multi-tenant for operational staff
- David Lipscomb says don’t over-engineer. Done right, there is no need to look ahead for 4-5 years
- When you are buying services for a mission critical
application, you should be a close partner to the service provider or
know very well about their technology - Companies should manage the layer of the stack where
there is business value and leave the lower level parts to reliable
third party service providers - When you outsource infrastructure, it is also important
to check if the service provider will support all the regulatory
requirements - Use multi-tenancy whereever you can
- Metered payment is a big attraction for Clouds
- Any resource you can consume programatically can be used on Clouds
