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."
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?
"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.
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 ;)
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.