I think I saw a tweet along the lines of "don't think of EC2 instances as you would servers."
The point is, achitecting for the cloud is all about treating your infrastructure as very transient and failure prone.
Hopefully stuff doesn't fail but architecting for that gives you a much better application.
Netflix are my favourite tech company based on their open source distributed system stuff. Check out Hystrix and their circuit breaker implementation. I am going to lean on that heavily in an upcoming project such that entire application tiers can dissapear with graceful degredation.
The point is, achitecting for the cloud is all about treating your infrastructure as very transient and failure prone.
Hopefully stuff doesn't fail but architecting for that gives you a much better application.
Netflix are my favourite tech company based on their open source distributed system stuff. Check out Hystrix and their circuit breaker implementation. I am going to lean on that heavily in an upcoming project such that entire application tiers can dissapear with graceful degredation.