AFUP Lyon

A look back at the AFUP LYON conference: never too early for the Cloud!

I recently attended a conference by Benoit Viguier (@b_viguier), CTO at Wizacha, which is entitled: never too early for the cloud.

The aim of the conference was to show why it can be interesting to choose a cloud hosting offer rather than a classic solution like a dedicated server when you are a startup.

The main argument is thatcloud hosting is flexible ! In other words, you can get 100% functional hosting very quickly. It is also possible to improve performance very quickly either by deploying more “machines” or by increasing their power. In the idea, we can perfectly start with a small instance knowing that we can increase its performance afterwards. This saves money when launching a product that is just in the teasing phase, for example.

Within a startup, we do not always have the skills required to set up a dedicated server from A to Z (security, correct server configuration, resource allocation, etc.). Brief, sysadmin it's a real job and a PaaS platform saves a lot of time on this point.

In summary, the few advantages are:

• Flexible
• Scalable as it adapts quickly and easily as needed
• Responsive: deploy new instances in minutes
• Makes infrastructure abstract
• Reassuring when you are not a sys admin
• Potentially cheaper?

A negative point (and there are surely many others) is that theself scaling.. it's not magic. Scaling servers can take several tens of minutes and during a rapid overload it will not be enough.

Thanks to Benoit for this beautiful presentation! I invite you to take a look at the slides which are fine.