Managing Your Thundering Herd Amazon Web Services provides tremendous tools and techniques for scaling services up and down in response to planned or experienced load. However, too many systems are configured to use AWS as an equipment-rental facility, which wastes money and does not take advantage of AWS' unique properties. We'll talk about how to build systems that flex-scale using AWS tools. Among the topics we'll cover are: -- Designing your application and database for sharding and scaling. -- Planning for load spikes. -- Detecting load fluctuations. -- Scripting your scale-up/scale-down functionality. -- Scaling the database vs scaling the application front-end. -- Monitoring and fault-recovery. The demonstrations will be specifically about AWS, but the techniques can also be applied to other cloud environments.