Amazon.com’s Journey to the Cloud [video]

I watched this over lunch and found it really interesting. Particularly:

* History of the retail site, early architecture. Originally ran on DEC hardware.

* How the retail side began to adopt AWS services for internal projects, non-critical features.

* Some details about their continuous deployment infrastructure (Apollo). "How would you manage deployment if you had infinite capacity?" New versions are stood up on clusters of new instances; the old instances are kept around for a while to allow for fast rollback.

* As of November 2010, all front-end webservers run on EC2.

* Scaling costs:

    "The cumulative amount of data stored predicts long-term hardware 
    spend more accurately than transactions per second"

Slides: http://qconsf.com/dl/qcon-sanfran-2011/slides/JohnRauser_Rea...