NFJS Day 2 Session 2: The 90 Minute Startup
Michael started the presentation off with giving us a rundown of hosting/startup options throughout the years, breaking down the costs of each approach. He basically grouped them into four categories:
| Capital / Hosting | Labor | Lead Time | Break-even Revenue | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Classic Hosting | $5 - 6M | $4 - 8M | 12 - 18 months | $370K per month |
| Self-Service Hosting | $10,000/month | $3 - 4M | 6 - 9 months | $370K per month |
| Virtual Private Server | $10,000/month | $100k - 1M | 1 - 4 months | $33K per month |
| Cloud Computing | $1,000/month | $5 - 80K | 1 day | $370K per month |
Right away he had something new that kind of blew my mind…. EC2. The idea was to harness the processing power available to you from cloud computing for your site and gave an example of how to quickly create your own server image.
With this done, he walked us through a very small GWT application and an associated ANT build script for it, then deployed it and we could even go view it at the provided url (I had this on here earlier, but removed the link since it was only up for the presentation). All up and working in 15 minutes. In only 10 more minutes he also setup Nagios .
Thoughts
I thought it was just really cool how fast you could get a site up and running and the amount of configurability that you had with EC2. You could install virtually anything on it and do anything… it was just like your own linux server. Also great was that you could take advantage of clustering with minimal hassle and fees. It just really blew my mind what you could do… my friends and myself just felt like getting out of there, getting an EC2 account, and start coding right away… it seems like Michael has that effect. 
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