In this post, I'll introduce you to some Amazon EC2 automation concepts and how they can be leveraged to run an elastic, role-based infrastructure. Examples given assume the use of Puppet (Master), but the concept should be portable to other configuration managers, as well as other, conceptually-similar infrastructure providers. Background

In the lead-up to the busy holiday season, we were actively reducing the amount of write operations that go to our MySQL databases, particularly writes which occur frequently where alternate solutions are readily available. Ultimately this would improve the reliability of our databases under the heavy loads we were expecting