Preface

I was lucky enough to fall in love with building software all the way back in 1997. This started with toy projects in Visual Basic (yikes) or HTML (yes, the <blink> and marquee tags appeared from time to time), and eventually moved on to “real work” using “more mature languages” like C#, Java, and Python. Throughout that time the infrastructure hosting these projects followed a similar evolution, starting with free static hosting and moving on to the “grown-up” hosting options like virtual private servers or dedicated hosts in a colocation facility. This certainly got the job done, but scaling up and down was frustrating (you had to place an order and wait a little bit), and the minimum purchase was usually a full calendar year.

But then things started to change. Somewhere around 2008, cloud computing became available using Amazon’s new Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Suddenly you had way more control over your infrastructure than ever before thanks to the ability to turn computers on and off using web-based APIs. To make things even better, you paid only for the time when the computer was actually running rather than for the entire year. It really was amazing.