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."

Comments

Re:Astro Turf

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Doesn't Microsoft employ "bloggers" to seed pro MS babble to Web sites like Slashdot? Just sayin'...

If you're going to troll, it might be a good idea RTFA beforehand so that you don't make a fool of yourself. Two examples:

- The web service is implemented in Python and currently deployed on two virtual machines at Amazon EC2.
- Like Asirra, we implemented Inkblot in Python.

If they're astroturfing they aren't very good at it.

The article has very little Microsoft-specific details in it. It's basically a short explanation of high-performance content delivery and a few stories about MS Research (link because they have some cool stuff) projects and how they fared with high load traffic surging (aka Slashdotting). They specifically mention getting Slashdotted several times, as well as surviving a DDoS.

Overall I thought it was an interesting article. I didn't realize Amazon's S3 service was so inexpensive or available to "budget" sites.