Inkling Software at CloudCamb
Belatedly, I’ll introduce myself as the third member of the Inkling Software team – I’m Toby White; and I’m responsible for most of the back-end infrastructure on which Timetric runs.
We’ve drunk heavily from the cloud-computing Kool-Aid – our platform runs on a custom software stack housed entirely in the cloud, on Amazon’s EC2 servers. And as dedicated AWS users, we were delighted to be invited to speak at the first CloudCamb user group meeting.
It turns out that the AWS offerings are a brilliant match for the sort of software products we’re building, and for the way in which we want to be able to run them. As a small company with a big vision, our time is very valuable, and the last thing we want to be doing is spending it worrying about details like keeping our machines going, worrying about power consumption, and so forth.
Even better, AWS offer an essentially fully script-able approach to the whole life-cycle of servers. Once we’ve put in the up-front effort to automate the construction and configuration of our software stack, we can bring up extra capacity almost at will.
This week gave us a particularly timely demonstration of the usefulness of this approach – we got a lead for a potential new customer last week (of whom more later, if everything goes according to plan …). We needed to write a custom front-end for them, and rapidly deploy it to a server instance for our sales guy to do a demo. EC2 let us trivially bring up a new server dedicated to the demo (so no worries about interfering services, etc.), and leave it in place for a few days. No need for new hardware – and we can keep the demo around for as long as we need, switch it off when we’re finished, and resuscitate it if necessary. And we can do the same thing time and time again for any similar situations.
(There’s another story in there about how we’ve architected our system nicely to allow the seamless introduction of such custom front-ends, but that can wait for another blog post.)
So I’ll be talking tomorrow evening (Wednesday 17th Dec) and showing a few slides about how and why we run our cloud-hosted service. Anyone in the area is welcome to show up, the meeting is open and free. Helpfully for us, it’s just round the corner from the office anyway!
The talks start at 5:30pm, in Room MR5 at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Wilberforce Rd, Cambridge, CB3 0WB (Map). I’m sandwiched in between two other speakers, both of whom will be just as fascinating, I’m sure!
[UPDATE: I've put a (heavily-edited) transcript of my talk up online]