
John Furrier44













Q4: Whats Elasticbeanstalk or EBS? Why do you guys like it? What do you do to add value to it for CrowdChat?

Drew Bratcher
EBS adds flexibility, simplifying automation of deployment across many machines and scalability based on custom triggers

Drew Bratcher
By comparison, services like heroku can get more pricy and more difficult to maintain. Also we already used many Amazon services, such as sqs and s3

John Furrier
Do you guys leverage both Redis and DynamoDB? how do you get real time working so great? That's a BFD (big freaking deal)

Crowd Doc
Abstraction from gears which we don't have to handle. It is directly integrated with our code on github. Devs can focus on writing code rather than spending time managing and configuring servers, databases, load balancers, firewalls etc.

Drew Bratcher
We maintain our custom scalable Redis in EC2, DynamoDB did not have the data structures and pubsub support needed for our socket.io channels and realtime events

Sirish Raghuram
@drew_bratcher Do you worry about getting locked in to AWS, if you are integrating with all of their higher level services? A lot of folks seem to try to insulate themselves using libraries such as libcloud / jcloud.

Crowd Doc
We primarily use Redis because it is more real-time than DynamoDB and it supports variety of data-structures and bigger data values for keys.

Drew Bratcher
@sirishraghuram it's true a bit of the code would need to be rewritten, but I like to think our code is modular enough that it would simply be a matter of rewriting a few files and ip references

Drew Bratcher
@sirishraghuram In general liblcoud/jcloud seems like extra overhead and code that you would have to maintain. Theoretically you should not be switching clouds often, that'd be couterproductive

Crowd Doc
@sirishraghuram Thats no real insulation with any library. Elasticbeanstalk does not require us to code anything differently. It just makes our deployment and maintenance easier

Crowd Doc
@sirishraghuram ELB also integrates with Docker which people now believe is most portable/insulated solution

Sirish Raghuram
@CrowdDr My point wasn't about ElasticBeanStalk in particular but a broader question around AWS Service APIs. We internally use tools like boto and when it came time to running our dev workloads against #OpenStack, it took longer than ideal.

Drew Bratcher
@sirishraghuram Oh yea I hate boto, I've tried to use it in the past with much pain. In general node has npm modules which make our life a breeze. Other clouds may not have as much support there as AWS of course

Sirish Raghuram
@drew_bratcher Node is awesome. Just npm is heaven for anyone who's had to deal with Python packages. I wish we could do a lot more node!