My name is Federico Feroldi, with this post I would like to introduce you to my new venture called Cloudify, a consulting company that will focus on cloud computing technologies and web-scale architectures.

During my career in the web world I have had the chance to work on sites and architectures designed to serve millions of user requests from all over the world.
Designing web-scale systems requires you to think about the web development in a completely different way. Every single flow of information must be carefully analyzed and optimized if you don’t want to see your web server die under the load of hundreds or thousands of users.

The first real experience I had with this kind of events was during my first year as a Yahoo! engineer, in 2001. At that time in the European data center we had about 15 web servers dedicated to the Yahoo! homepages of UK, Italy, Spain, Germany and France.
We all know what happened on September, 11th of that year. For the first time in the modern web era every one of the millions of Internet users all over the world had the technology in their hands to follow history in real time.
It’s fair to say that nobody in the web technology world was prepared for such an event. Quickly, as the millions of requests hit the world’s most popular homepages the servers reached their capacity, and suddenly we faced what was probably the first web information blackout.

The only solution to the problem was to quickly add more servers to cope with the load. Buying them wasn’t an option so we took away machines from other services, idle boxes and any available server and we added them to the homepage pool.

Information blackouts occurred many other times during those days, but the web survived, and we learned a lesson: you should be prepared to scale, fast and easy.

I believe that after those events many people started to think about better ways to scale an infrastructure, and that was probably one of the reasons for the development of cloud computing technologies.

With cloud computing services like Amazon Elastic Cloud, we can now deploy tens of new machines in a few minutes to cope with predictable and unpredictable loads. Then we can easily dismiss them, paying only for what we used. No setup costs, no iron, no idle machines wasting electricity. This is a really green technology.

I think that in the current economically challenging time more and more companies will need to optimize their costs and having idle machines wasting energy is all but cost saving.
Investing in a technology like cloud computing, that allows you to buy the computing power when you need it and only for the amount of time you need it, is a real cost saver.

I truly believe in this technology, so I decided to create Cloudify to deliver high quality and innovative solutions based on cloud computing technologies like Amazon Elastic Cloud and scalable parallel architectures like Apache Hadoop and Nvidia CUDA.

If you’re interested and want to have a chat, feel free to write to info@cloudify.me or contact me through my LinkedIn profile.