Our AWS Cloud Journey

Catalyst IT is one of Australia's largest open source software houses. We are all about using the awesome array of tools at our disposal from the FOSS (Free and Open Source) spectrum.

In Nov 2012, Catalyst was engaged by a major Australian university to help them pioneer an Australian MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) application - Open2Study.com

From the outset, the application was to be hosted on AWS (Amazon Web Services). Catalyst had experience with applications on AWS but the scale and business requirements of Open2Study meant there was a lot for us to learn and master throughout the build and deployment.

The application is a customised extension of Drupal, Moodle and simpleSAMLphp.

Moodle is an open source LMS (Learning Management System)

Coming from a background of deployment onto both physical and virtual hardware, Catalyst was used to working within the confines of various linux environments.

Building and deploying our application into a full AWS environment gave us a great opportunity to get to grips with the power and challenges associated with Amazon's infrastructure-as-a-service offering.

• Deploying our application into AWS - Architecting for failure (cattle vs pets)
• Stateless EC2 instances for many of the infrastructure roles.
• Using Orchestration technology (OpsWorks)
• Taking advantage of the cool auto-scaling functionality for load tolerance.
• Deciding which of the 100 different AWS services fit our solution.
• Working with the AWS Solutions Architects.
• Picking up the the AWS vocabulary (DNS is route53, Cloudwatch = monitoring)
• Building our own DOS Load Testing tool - angry bees with machine guns.
• Applying the AWS toolset in new ways to facilitate load tolerance.

Hope that we'll have time for some questions at the end.

Да, я сделаю презентацию на русском языке.