Battle Scars: Scaling Big Startups in the Cloud

As CTO of a successful high-growth startup, and in my new stealth company, I've seen my share of challenging scenarios keeping a very busy PostgreSQL-based business online and responsive during tremendous growth. EC2 + PostgreSQL + PostGIS + + Scala + Ruby + no downtime. Others can probably learn from my battle scars!

Running multiple PostgreSQL, Ruby, Solr, and Scala instances on the EC2 cloud opens up many possibilities for scaling infrastructure, but also introduces a number challenges. From unpredictable disk i/o, to RAM constraints, vanishing instances and replication challenges, this talk aims to share real-world experiences and solutions with Postgres 8.* and 9.* and all of the technologies we used to build solutions.

It covers the topic via a series of anecdotes from tiny team of developers supporting one of the biggest sites in the world (CNN.com); these stories range from humorous to horrifying, and there are valuable lessons for attendees running or contemplating a similar architecture with PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Solr, Ruby, and Scala.