by Gemma Hentsch for
When you deploy web applications, you do so onto air-conditioned servers on UPS powered racks with reliable, redundant fat pipes connected to a world of web services and data. Infrastructure is for the most part thought of as reliable, its one of those things you usually get to assume. But, what happens when you deploy in a very different environment, one in which the connection to the outside world would make a 3g connection look fast and reliable, where your any of your servers might overheat, and where that already clogged internal network cable has a spade go through it mid message?
Its not actually impossible, and you can do it all with python, and I hope to explain how, why and what else you might think of. The talk is going to be split down the middle, one half focusing on low level python networking, and the other about building your apps and daemons with fragility in mind. Most situations are not going to be as extreme as a construction site/event space in Beijing, but it doesn’t hurt to build leaner and more rugged applications even when they are running in the cloud, because lightning can strike the same data centre twice.
