TripAdvisor took a serious look at runing its site in the cloud by deploying a complete version of TripAdvisor on Amazon Web Services. Here, in their own words, and a lot of technical detail, is their story of what they learned.

This summer, TripAdvisor worked on an experimental project to evaluate running an entire production site in Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) environment. When teh company first started to experiment hosting tripadvisor.com and all international domains in the EC2 environment, the response from many of the members of its engineering organization was very simple: is it really worth paying Amazon when we already own our own hardware? And can it perform as well?

A few months later, as its great experiment in the cloud comes to a close, the answer is, of course, yes and no. TripAdvisor learned a lot during this time, not only about the amazing benefits and severe pitfalls to AWS, but also how it might improve its architecture in its own, traditional colocation environment. And though the company is not (yet?) prepared to flip over the DNS and send all traffic through AWS, its elasticity has proven to be an extremely useful and practical, learning tool.

Source: http://highscalability.com

Alina