Full disclosure: I love working in the Cloud! I’ve been at a few companies that have their infrastructure in the cloud, including my current position. The cloud makes it incredibly easy to create servers and environments, and that really helps when one is in a pinch.
Speaking of a pinch: recently I got myself into a sorta big pinch: we converted our WebAPI environment to docker containers, but we forgot to have it run our Node server with “Node” permissions instead of “root”. Well, images that were uploaded into our environment had “root” permissions, which needless to say our asynchronous job for optimizing the images for the web failed. Bigger problem: they failed gracefully without alerting us. 😦
Three weeks of customer images, over 14,000 of them, where not web optimized! Holy CRAP!!!
Optionality
Optionality, the potential for many options, is important when dealing with complex systems. This is something I practice at every level of our development systems, including at the server level. For IT, the Cloud provides many wondrous options, including options for me to quickly optimize these images without slowing down production servers.
With a click of a button, I was able to duplicate our asynchronous job environment and its queue (SQS). After that was created, I spammed it with the 14,000 job requests for web optimizing the images. Within 15 minutes, I had a new job environment crunching on the production images!
Production is still humming along without any knowledge that there are 4 other servers crunching away.
Paying for More Servers, NOOOO!!!!
It took a little while, but after a few hours my new environment web optimized all 14,000 images. Well, I really don’t wanna pay for those 4 servers, so I deleted the new environment. I only had to pay for a few hours of time for those servers, so the cost was pretty minimal.
Overview
So, if you are thinking about switching to the cloud, include in your discussion the added optionality your team/company will have, including the ability to quickly spin up servers/environments when needed.
LongLoft - Code Writer 