Viadeo is the #1 professional social network in France with over 9 million members. Founded in 2005, the company grew its business using traditional infrastructure (about 250 servers hosted in the US).
However, a number of challenges started to rise in 2014:

• Can the agility of our infrastructure match our software agility?
• In particular, how can we efficiently scale our data storage and processing capabilities?
• How can we build a better disaster recovery plan?
• How can we globally optimize our infrastructure spend?

After a thorough study, Viadeo decided in early 2015 to migrate 100% of its physical infrastructure to Amazon Web Services.
This presentation will cover:

• the thought process that led to this unconventional move (for an established company like Viadeo),
• our design options and trade-offs, focusing on delivery speed and risk avoidance,
• why we did or didn’t alter parts of our stack, especially on the backend side (MySQL, ElasticSearch, HBase, Hadoop),
• the complete automation and testing of our infrastructure build, aka “infrastructure as code” using AWS CloudFormation, Puppet, and continuous integration
• and more!