Sessions at Surge 2010 about Web APIs on Thursday 30th September

What is possible when you can consume compute resources on various hosting providers with nothing more than a python script? This talk will discuss Apache Libcloud, an Apache Incubator project dedicated to building standard interfaces into cloud computing.

Apache Libcloud is a unified interface into many popular cloud providers such as Amazon EC2, GoGrid, and Rackspace. Libcloud was created to address the problem that each cloud hosting provider provides a proprietary, slightly different, implementation of their API for accessing resources. Libcloud brings interoperability, visibility, and more importantly scriptability to many standard system administrator tasks.

In addition to providing APIs to manage servers, Libcloud is working on developing a portable Server Image format, so that identical machines can be created on any cloud provider, without a dependency on configuration management tools.

Web Services are often conflated with Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). This talk is about REST, JSON, HTTP. And not about SOAP, WSDL or even XML. It will describe the long path from a monolithic two-and-a-half-tier LAMP architecture to decoupled webservice oriented approach.

About 70 developers, product-owner and scrum master in 8 Scrum teams had to be coordinated on tasks dealing with daily business, new product features and the "open heart surgery" to transform Germany's biggest website without downtime to this new model.

Nowadays Federated Autonomous Services (FAS) have their own dedicated developer and operations team, their own release cycle. They still serve over 18 Billion dynamic HTTP requests a month. They expose their interface via HTTP and have a standardized way to deal with Access Control, Service Configuration and Event Handling. They have no real-time dependencies to any other service, except for infrastructural ones.

The talk will show how Open Source Software like Nginx, HAProxy, Tornado, memcached or jetty power the backbone of the VZ infrastructure. It will also show how one can reduce complexity and cost by moving away from centralized, expensive HA components (aka NetApp, HDS) to commodity hardware.