Mozilla’s journey from the data center to the cloud

Description

Michael Van Kleeck leads a frank discussion of Mozilla’s multiyear journey to take all of its apps from the data center to the cloud. Join in to hear about the adventure, in which Mozilla vanquishes a multitude of organizational and technical challenges and emerges ready to empower its mission of protecting the open internet.

Mozilla decided to migrate its application inventory from multiple data centers to Amazon Web Services to save money, increase scalability and reliability, and take advantage of the full suite of available cloud services. At the time, the quality of Mozilla’s application inventory was inconsistent at best. Operational health and ownership of applications was largely undefined. Technology stacks were undocumented and often poorly understood. Organizationally, Mozilla understood data centers and tried unsuccessfully to replicate data center practices in the cloud. Eventually, a dedicated team, well-versed in cloud technologies, took ownership of the process and pivoted the effort from “design by committee” to prototype-driven development. However, the small team, working in isolation, quickly fell behind market forces, and the lack of sharing in their process led to further fragmentation in the journey to the cloud.

Today, Mozilla finds itself maintaining a range of different cloud infrastructures, as well as a smaller physical data center, and very little application debt was paid down in the migration. How can a small org like Mozilla find its way to cloud sanity after an arduous journey to get into the cloud? How can it pay down the debt of a cloud journey and free the organization to experiment and find new ways to sustain its mission? Come explore the current state of Mozilla and get a glimpse of the future in this imaginative session.