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Building Big Sites on a Budget
Joe Mamma writes: "There is a good article on Anandtech.com about how they upgraded their backend. They are running a bunch of AMD chips in their servers and make good use of the Linux Virtual Server Project software for their load balancers. Anyway its a good read for those who are looking to expand their web backend on a budget."
Almost every car has a water pump. Any schmuck can design a $400 water pump that does it's job. A real engineer can design one that does it's job for 20 bucks.
As a network engineer, coder, or architect, your job is to make your client's project a success and deliver the most value possible. Your job is not to cover your ass, or to to get the project done with as little of your sweat as possible.
That's the unstated contract that drives tech jobs to get the salaries they do, and the "Let's just throw Solaris at it," or "Microsoft is easier - they say so!" attitude is undermining the tech inustry.
For web hosting, networking and network servers, Linux or a BSD on X86/AMD gives more bang for the buck than any other offering right now. Even though they have less froofy tools and don't have as much in the clicky GUI department. Yes, you have to be careful with hardware choices - You don't with NT? Yes, you need to know what you're doing - why do you have this job if you don't know what you're doing?
MySQL does a great job, no matter how much it may suck "theoretically", or how it may fail the ACID test. Compare the number of MySQL horror stories to the number of MySQL positive anecdotes you hear. It works, it's fast, it does the job.
Building solid, cheap boxen and deploying them in a stable configuration at low cost is an art. Call them 'frankenstien boxes' if you want, but they get the job done, and they let me come in with quotes at half of what my competiton does, and the stability and value get me return business.
Buying Solaris and having them do all the heavy lifting for you generally means you haven't done the value calculation for your clients. Solaris is good, and Sun hardware is good - but neither is *that* good.
Buying Microsoft - I hate to bash MS for the sake of bashing MS. Win2k *is* thier best offering yet. But it still bluescreens, DLL Hell still exists, it still needs to be reformatted every few months, it costs too much, it eats RAM, and not being able to remotely maintain it or to see the source so I can figure out what's causing strange behavior, coupled with MS' predatory business practices just makes it a non-option for me. YMMV.
The days of the Mercedes dot-bombs is over, and tossing cash at problems isn't the way things are being done today. Look around you and start gearing up for the Toyota world of working fast, smart and as cheaply as possible to get the job done.