When the cloud doesn’t scale

Cloud is nice and fluffy until the very moment you realize that you are coming up with workarounds to work with the service limitations. And that you are paying an arm a leg for it, and still getting certain shape box, and it's not the shape you need anymore. It's easy to get started with a blackbox service, but harder to make it grow with you.

At Shopify we try to reap the benefits of running our own infrastructure to keep our customers 24/7 and 200K+ RPM business ticking while trying to make bare metal as programmable as a cloud service. This talk covers the cost, performance and technical reasons behind that, and how we handle our datacenters as agile as possible.

Niko Kurtti is a tinkerer who is fortunate enough to get paid for doing it professionally at Shopify. Recovering Java programmer doing mostly Ruby these days. Loves to talk about WEBSCALE and infrastructure as code. Lives in the countryside with a fiance, VW Beetle and three cats.