And you are here why?

So you’re going to revolutionize ice-cream delivery, through the powers of your iOS/Android app. ( Work with me here. Pretend that you’ve actually invented a better mouse-trap ) Your back-end runs on an AWS/EC2 instance, which is fine while you’re developing, but as you start thinking about real live customers,  reliability  comes to mind, and you split the back-end up so that it’s running on  TWO  AWS/EC2 instances. Great, right? If one goes down, the other takes over the load, and everything is hunky dory (as long as you the combined load is less than the capacity of any one of the servers, but let’s ignore that for now). Except, what if  AWS itself goes down ? As  June 29, 2012  taught a lot of us, the un-imagineable  does  happen every now and then. The solution, of course, is to deploy your instances across multiple availability zones, or maybe even multiple regions, or heck, while you’re at it, across multiple cloud providers....

A friend of mine has a restaurant in the East Village ( Grape & Grain  — you should go!). It’s a small thing, seating maybe two dozen people. The fascinating part is how the chef — Adam Rule — generates consistently great dishes despite his “kitchen” consisting of 3 induction plates and a convection oven, all tucked into a corner. I’ve seen him operating when • A group books the entire restaurant for dinner, and pre-selects the menu (“ Could you serve everyone clams for starters, then pasta, the sea-bass, and pavlova for dessert? ” • There are never more than a dozen or so in the restaurant, but as one couple leaves another shows up. This from 6pm to midnight • A dozen people suddenly show up, and proceed to order  everything  off the menu. And in all these cases, the food always shows up like clockwork, the entire party gets their pasta at the same time, newcomers don’t sit around waiting, etc. You get the point, the service is exactly what you would expect at...