Meet the LISA '12 Instructors: William LeFebvre on Using Amazon Web Services

In this interview, Matt Simmons talks to LISA '12 instructor William LeFebvre.

Prior to a couple of years ago, "in the cloud" meant a term of abstraction, coming from the network diagram icon, meaning "we don't control this area of the network". A cloud meant that you didn't know or care about it, for the purposes of the discussion at hand.

Recently, though, "The Cloud" has become a phrase meaning Something as a Service, whether that something was Software (such as the case of webmail or an outsourced bug tracking solution), Platform (such as a provider-hosted tomcat or IIS server that you ran your code on), or Infrastructure (where you had full hosted virtual machines that you fully administered).

The last one, IaaS, has become a widely used and heavily populated market segment in which billions of dollars are spent and generated annually. The 800-pound gorilla of the IaaS world is Amazon Web Services, which began back in 2002 as a way for Amazon to utilize the server infrastructure that powered their online store better. Over the past decade, AWS has grown to become a global solution offering an entire ecosystem of managed services, with data centers in North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

Because the range of services is so wide, knowing how to get a handle on where to begin is challenging. Long-time LISA instructors William LeFebvre and Marc Stavely are teaching a course to help people out, Using Amazon Web Services, where attendees will get exposure to the AWS infrastructure and be able to bring back the knowledge required to make effective use of the Amazon cloud. I got the chance to talk with William about the class:

Matt: Where do you draw the line between being a cloud provider and a run of the mill hosting provider?

William: The dividing line between cloud and regular hosting is a bit fuzzy, but the differentiators in my mind are: a cloud provider bills by the hour (rather than by the month) and has a rich API that either provides or makes creating automatic (programmatic) scaling easy.

Matt: Amazon seems to roll out new services and features constantly. How do you stay on top of things?

William: Amazon regularly sends out electronic newsletters and announcements of new services and changes to existing services. I always read them. I only use a tenth of what Amazon provides, but I want to know what services are provided even if I am not familiar with how to use them.

Matt: What kinds of things can a person do to minimize costs when first experimenting with AWS features?

William: AWS has a "free tier" for some of its services that is ideal for experimentation. Even if you aren't eligible for the free tier, using a service for a short period of time or at a low volume is generally inexpensive.

Matt: What do you see as the biggest stumbling block to people adopting a hosted cloud environment, and what would you say to people who are concerned about that?

William: I see two significant challenges for first-time adopters. The initial problem is learning the details of all the services. Amazon provides a rich collection: sometimes a particular service is a good fit and sometimes it isn't. A new user needs to become familiar with the interface and the API. Once that hurdle is cleared, the next challenge is keeping track of everything and ensuring the systems are configured correctly. This is usually solved by adapting one of the configuration management tools (cfengine, puppet, bcfg2, chef, etc.) for use in the cloud.

Matt: In one sentence, why should people attend your class at LISA12?

William: If you are new to AWS then you should attend our class because we will teach you everything you need to know to get you started.

Matt: Thanks for your time, William! I'll see you at LISA!

You can catch the all-day class on Saturday, in room Nautilus 2.

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