Cloud Strategy and Implementation

Migrating Applications to the Cloud

The business case for moving applications to the cloud is impossible to ignore. Provisioning systems is vastly cheaper. New applications can be brought on line without painstaking hardware procurement. Technologies such as Amazon's EBS storage systems provide extreme redundancy without intensive systems administration. There are dozens of cloud technologies that allow applications to be developed and deployed inexpensively, with a substantially smaller maintenance footprint than running the same applications internally.

The business case for moving applications to the cloud is too hard to ignore. Provisioning systems is vastly cheaper.

Of course, the cloud presents unique challenges that differ from traditional hosting. Running inside an external multi-tenant virtualized environment makes data access much slower than we're used to. More sinisterly, there are other types of failures to plan for, and when systems fail they may fail in non-obvious or very subtle ways, involving underlying infrastructure issues that are not transparent. Thumbtack's background in distributed and fault-tolerant systems is ideally suited to moving applications to the cloud. Our core architectural principle is producing repeatable, horizontally scalable, time-independent services, a paradigm fits perfectly with cloud deployments. Even when our clients choose a traditional deployment model, our systems are built in a way that will fit well should they later chose to move to the cloud.

Hybrid Solutions

Most organizations will benefit from a blend of locally maintained and cloud environments. Total control over sensitive data is critical for some applications, while flexibility in scaling and provisioning is invaluable for many more. Thumbtack solutions work with a variety of cloud providers and integrate into traditional hosted infrastructures. Moreover, our management tools allow you to maintain a consistent view of your application infrastructure across internal networks as well as public and private clouds.