In 2010, Vector Fabrics, a high-tech startup in Eindhoven, deployed a unique service in the Amazon Cloud. The web service assisted programmers in parallelizing C/C++ code for multi-processor platforms. Two years later, Vector Fabrics completely abandoned the cloud and provided a similar service as a Desktop product. What happened?

This talk presents the case study of providing a compute intensive, yet interactive application in the cloud. As this is not a standard web service, we will dive into the gory details of preparing your own Linux images, provisioning, isetting up security, creating asynchronous servers, and monitoring the cloud. Think for example of the security challenge of allowing the user to upload their own C/C++ code. What havoc can a user wreak if his code executes in a cloud environment that is shared with other users?

Apart from presenting a number of best practices to roll your own Amazon-based compute service, we will carefully show the differences between a cloud and desktop-based product.

The slides of his presentation can be downloaded here: [slides]