• How do I make sure my application is built for the cloud with scalability baked into the architecture?
• I know disk performance is crucial for my database tier.  How do I get the best disk performance with Amazon Web Services & EC2?
• How do I keep my AWS passwords, keys & certificates secure?
• Should I be doing offsite backups as well, or are snapshots enough?
• Cloud providers such as Amazon seem to have poor SLAs (service level agreements).  How do I mitigate this using availability zones & regions?
• Cloud hosting environments like Amazons provide no perimeter security.  How do I use security groups to ensure my setup is robust and bulletproof?
• Cloud deployments change the entire procurement process, handing a lot of control over to the web operations team.  How do I ensure that finance and ops are working together, and a ceiling budget is set and implemented?
• Reliability of Amazon EC2 servers is much lower than traditional hosted servers.  Failure is inevitable.  How do we use this fact to our advantage, forcing discipline in the deployment and disaster recovery processes?  How do I make sure my processes are scripted & firedrill tested?
• Snapshot backups and other data stored in S3 are somewhat less secure than I’d like.  Should I use encryption to protect this data?  When and where should I use encrypted filesystems to protect my more sensitive data?
• How can I best use availability zones and regions to geographically disperse my data and increase availability?

As we publish each of the individual articles in this series we’ll link them to the titles below.  So check back soon!