Slashdot Mirror
Handling Flash Crowds From Your Garage
slashdotmsiriv writes "This paper from Microsoft Research describes the issues and tradeoffs a typical garage innovator encounters when building low-cost, scalable Internet services. The paper is a more formal analysis of the problems encountered and solutions employed a few months back when Animoto, with its new Facebook app, had to scale by a factor of 10 in 3 days. In addition, the article offers an overview of the current state of utility computing (S3, EC2, etc.) and of the most common strategies for building scalable Internet services."
Here I was picturing a bunch of people showing up in your garage for seemingly no reason. Still interesting to see how they handled the massive increase!
Doesn't Microsoft employ "bloggers" to seed pro MS babble to Web sites like Slashdot? Just sayin' ...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
This paper from Microsoft Research describes the issues and tradeoffs a typical garage innovator encounters when building low-cost, scalable Internet services.
Anyone else initially think that Microsoft was talking about Google after reading that first sentence?
Linking your site in your sig is a good way to test the scaling as the slashdot crowd hits your site.
Winkey shortcut mapping for 64bit windows. WinKeyPlus
Since I can't see any pix in the area near the bottom called "Figure: DNS servers fail over very quickly when an upstream server fails" - does that mean that the flash crowd called "SLASHDOT" has taken down this part of the article called "Handling Flash Crowds..." ?
I mean sheesh! They even mention slashdot!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
"Our innovator may get only one shot at widespread publicity. If and when that happens, tens of thousands of people will visit her site. But a flash crowd is notoriously fickle; "
The "researchers" offer a strange view of how the market works. If the idea is good then surely the site will enjoy numerous opportunities for growth and referral every time a happy user recommends it to a friend. A good, innovative idea will not be sunk by one underprovisioned flash crowd.
including one that was (literally) Slashdotted
Anybody here think slashdot should be protecting it's brand here? Isn't this similar to using google as a verb? I think this is the only place one should be allowed to use that term. Microsoft most definitely shouldn't be allowed.
Actually, in this case I really wonder if he manages to make a profit. I looked at the amazon cloud recently, and if you really have one CPU unit running there non-stop -for year, it is pretty expensive, around 700 dollars I believe. For something like that you could also just get a dedicated rack server. So if this guy apparently needs a lot more than that, he sure needs to make quite a lot of money from his facebook app, because he will be spending several thousands of dollars on CPU power.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
Then you don't need as much brute force ?
Deleted
Hmm, you're right. Better revamp the method:
1) Be myspace or facebook
2) ride on the coattails of self-absorbed attention whores
3) ???
4) Profit!
5) throw doggie bones to javascript noobs so that sites' users could be spammed with even more movie quizzes.(You too can be a myspace developer! Valid e-mail address and fake phone number required)
A paper on how to avoid slashdotting, posted on slashdot. /me clicks obsessively on links
Pet peeve: Profane people propagating perfunctory pedantry.
They've mixed their metaphors, since it was the founders of Apple who innovated in a garage, and Google who provide a scalable Internet service...
What the hell is that article talking about? I don't understand a single flippin' word of it!
Of course, I'm completely guessing here, but they probably required you to invite 20 brazillion of your imaginary Facebook friends before you could install it.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Well, you have to compare apples to apples with hosting, though. With Amazon's cheapest EC2 instance, you are looking at $72/month cost, or about $850/year. You have a bit more for storage, static IP, etc. But, it sure as shit beats the heck out of other boxes you could get at guys like GoDaddy and 1and1, where you get a shared box, with minimal control and cpanel or something at best, unlike root access at Amazon or admin access at GoGrid's windows boxes. You could go to services like Linode and get boxes with root access, but when you do the math, you will be hard pressed to get a comparable box at this rate. That, coupled with the flexibility of a pay-as-you-go model really does make this ideal for several situations. With the recent addition of persistent storage, you can even run full-blown db-driven apps here (something that was a pain in the ass before PS, because you had to use s3 as your permanent store). If you go to guys like Rackspace or other reputable providers, you are looking at $600-700 a MONTH as a start. Should you choose to own the iron yourself, you can probably get comparable numbers up to a certain threshold, but then you are left with hardware management issues. Of course, not that Amazon ever goes down ;)
The problem with most sites is that they never expected the sudden burst in popularity, and having never bothered to test if their service was scalable, had to rush and fix it before people start noticing reliability problems. If you at least attempted to write a scalable app to start with, even if you don't have the details nailed down, you've taken a step in the right direction.
Animoto looks like an interesting case because it's a really resource-hungry app that has to put together a video with effects and music. Most sites have trouble just serving up dynamically-updated text. All those EC2 instances and the high-bandwidth needed sounds like a lot of money. Scaling up a business plan is at least as difficult as scaling software.
hmmhmm, no no. I have a virtual server with root access and even ability to use serial access over ssh if everything else fails. This is about 9 euro per month. for 72 euro per month I can get a nice single core machine with 2 GB ram and 2X250 GB in raid 1. And I'm not even at the cheapest provider. Thing is of course, that such providers work with yearly contracts and you cannot catch peak usage as nicely as with amazon's cloud. I am just saying that when you as a garage shop get a large amount of traffic at once, you not only need the hardware, you still need to make sure you make a considerable amount of cash before you bankrupt yourself into popularity.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
if you really have one CPU unit running there non-stop -for year, it is pretty expensive, around 700 dollars I believe.
That's pretty damn cheap. A dedicated rack server is upwards of $300/month most places, and it does not provide the "elastic" part of the Amazon cloud for when your service takes on heavy demand. Rackspace, for example, provides a comparable unit at $383/mo.
You might be talking about a Virtual Private Server--there are a number of services offering similar specs in the $120-200 range...still more expensive, but more comparable to EC2.
can trace their success to that one weekend or month or season where things really took off
additionally, you misunderstand that the flash crowd is not something that comes and goes, but something that comes and stays
but sure, you are correct: a good innovative idea will find a way regardless of inability to scale quickly. some other guy will make work what you can't. you could retard your growth for awhile while you tinker with how to scale. but if some other guy takes your good, innovative idea and runs with it further and faster than you do, you are doomed to obscurity while he reaps the benefits of your good idea
so you shouldn't be giving advice on how the market works, because the fickleness you dismiss really is a big deal and is not to be taken lightly
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Well, that was the whole point. One CPU-unit for the whole year is more expensive than needed; but for such cases you need 0.01 'units' non-stop for the whole year, and 100 units for one weekend, it's much cheaper in Amazon's way.
Could someone provide a translation of the summary for those of us who speak English rather than promotional BS? .. on second thoughts, never mind.
Try Proto Balance: www.protonet.co.za
Absolutely agree that cloud hosting services offer significant economies over traditional hosting. While we're naming vendors, a more complete list of cloud vendors includes the following (and most offer a much fuller range of web hosting services than EC2!):
US: Amazon EC2, MediaTemple, GoGrid, Mosso, Linode, Joyent
UK: ElasticHosts, FlexiScale
Hmm, and argument that neither requires nor accepts any proof, and it has CAPS LOCK words!
You win, sir.
As to what you win, well....
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Which MS group do you work for? Are you at the main campas or Red West?
First they use the argument that any geek/nerd with a good idea can put them out of business in their anti-trust case (argument also made in Hackers 3: Antitrust (movie)) and now they try to discourage anyone trying to set up something in their garage (while covering their asses to make you believe they try to help these people by giving them 'good advice'). This is ofcourse is totally unrelated to the fact that MS is gearing towards web 3.0 (turn on sarcasm scanners)...
Here be signatures
linode is #20/mo.
But where's the money coming from?
IIRC the article mentioned thousands of servers at one point.
Because in English, all nouns will eventually be verbed, and vice versa. I'm sure there's some ivory tower dweller somewhere who can tell us what the first recorded example is, and that it probably wasn't in English. Xerox, however, has been superseded because only old people use photocopiers any more (except at the library sometimes. Most people don't bring in a scanner.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Softlayer has multi-core boxes starting at $150/month; we've got a box with them with a 15k RPM SCSI drive for about $300/mo.
For dinky personal projects, I've got a dedicated Athlon XP 2400+ with half a gig of ram with a little no-name provider -- and it only runs me $50/mo.
I've seen all sorts of prices in the $50 - $300 range for varying hardware. If you're willing to gamble on a lesser known host, you can get hardware cheap.
I wouldn't necessarily recommend running an established webapp with thousands of active users in a datacenter like this, but when you're at the "garage" stage, they're more than sufficient. They're certainly preferable to shared hosting on a grade-A provider, from what I've seen.
I handle flash crowds from my garage with pepper spray, and if that does not work, having a shotgun for escalation.*sarcasm*
In this contest to be clever with the language, all I see is a bunch of idiots outsmarting themselves.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
None of that is comparable hardware. Softlayer has pretty good prices, but you're still looking at $200/mo with no elasticity for the best approximation. EC2 is still roughly 1/3 the price.
An Athlon at a no-name provider isn't even worth mentioning in comparison to one of these units. Web hosting can be found for cheap. I wouldn't even jokingly put them in the same class, though.
No, it's not. Its closest plan to an EC2 "small" instance is $80/month for one-third the storage and less RAM. If Linode offered a comparable service, it'd be about $110/month.
http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix08/tech/full_papers/elson/elson.pdf
nosig today
I have quite a nice VPS with 512mb ram at SliceHost.
$38/month.
Your prices are a tad high.
Your plan has less than one-third the RAM and about one-eighth the storage.
EC2 minimum units: 1.7GB RAM, 160GB storage. Price at your host for the closest analogue (2GB/80GB): $140 (well within the 120-200 range I stated). Total price to operate the EC2 unit: $72 plus bandwidth.
Moreover, where EC2 really cuts into the competition is scaling at larger units, particularly with regard to hourly billing (allowing much more granularity in service and pricing). EC2's mid-size unit absolutely crushes the specs of your host's very best plan, and at a comparable price.
Your ability to compare services is subpar. You can get webhosting VPS for $10/month with some plans. That doesn't make it comparable to an EC2 unit. That said, your host has generous bandwidth caps for the price points and is certainly adequate for someone who doesn't need the muscle of EC2 services.
There's some irony in this appearing on slashdot today: it seems like all I can get out of reddit all morning is a "Service Unavailable" message :-)
You must not have shopped around a lot! We're paying ~$160/mo for some really nice Core2Duo machines with healthy specs (2GB RAM / 160GB HDD / 2TB quota, I think).
Just turn off the local displacement booths when you reach a certain threshold. Make them walk a few blocks extra that's all.
"...The next thing anyone knows, every man, woman and child in the country has decided that he wants to see the red tide at Hermosa Beach..."
"Another flash crowd. It figures," said Jerryberry. "You can get a flash crowd anywhere there are displacement booths."
From Flash Crowd, by Larry Niven.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23