Finally, after hours of hard work and with the beta launching date getting closer, we've moved all Woices infrastructure to the cloud. Loving living always at the edge, the cloud (or the grid, whatever you want to call it) have appealed us from the very beginning. In the cloud, you access storage and computing power on demand. In the most extreme case you can even manage to virtualize all your project infrastructure, getting rid of physical servers (or at least they are invisible to you since you view the the cloud as kind of homogeneous virtual space).Some of you may have noticed that we were already using the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to store and retrieve the final processed echoes. Now we have also moved our whole computing infrastructure: web application servers, streaming and transcoding servers, databases, etc. thanks to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and its new (and long awaited) Elastic Block Storage (EBS) that allows data persistence independently of EC2 instances (virtual servers).
Besides fulfilling our insatiable appetite for the new new thing, moving to the cloud allows us to nicely scale Woices. Now we can automatically detect when the system is overloaded due to a higher traffic volume or computing needs and dynamically create (or instantiate) new virtual servers that increase the system capacity. These new instances will also be automatically destroyed as easily as they were created once they are no longer needed. Look ma, no hands! :-)
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