Scaling on EC2 - WebMynd's experiences (YC Winter '08) | Hacker News Reader

Scaling on EC2 - WebMynd's experiences (YC Winter '08)

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80 pointsamirnathoo15 comments

I notice that he mentions that his database is remote. I would really like to try this so that I can establish scale with EC2 without moving my database.

Has anyone done this? Do you establish a tunnel between the two locations? How does this kind of latency affect an application? Any other pros and cons?

If your schema is simple, you might want to check out SimpleDB. No need to setup tunnels (queries are handled over HTTP), and latency is super low when querying from an EC2 instance with both end points being inside AWS networks. You are also not charged for traffic between EC2/SimpleDB.

What do you guys do to manage your servers? Have you scaled to a point where you automatically scale and downsize servers?

Great question, I might well write another post about this because it's a really interesting problem.

The software and services that we looked at to address this problem all left us pretty lukewarm. We needed distributed configuration and resource management, logging and alerting at a minimum.

To cut a long story short, we've written our own system, which draws on ideas from things like rush, capistrano, munin and nagios and tailors it for our needs.

At the moment, we have a system which gives us the information we need to make decisions on commissioning new servers etc, and wakes us up in the middle of the night when something goes wrong. I expect the capabilities to grow to include auto-scaling, auto-healing and some other bits and pieces as I get the time and our needs mature.

the author hits the nail on the head. isolate, isolate, isolate all the moving parts of your system. as every talking head pundit has pointed out since they were slapped in the face by amazon and their massive 800 pound cloud, the cloud is where computing will be done in the future.

even today in my it group we use a citrix cloud to provide remote access services for our users. the cloud concept isnt new but it is being used in new and interesting ways. now... where is the hp/ibm/microsoft/sun cloud? where is the emc storage cloud and the vmware compute cloud?

My view is that you probably won't see the HP/IBM/... companies enter this market as it's already commoditised (even though there's only really one player): they prefer to focus on high value, high margin products and services.

Sun is the only one in the space: http://www.sun.com/service/sungrid/index.jsp - they're currently task-centric grid computing rather than machine-centric cloud computing.

In many ways, running applications on a grid rather than machines in a cloud is a more pleasing idea, and fits better with the point I make in the post, but pragmatism wins out: the edge cases and dynamic requirements mean running virtual machines is often much more convenient.

It's unfortunate, too, since many of the small guys that will use EC2 to scale will eventually need enterprise-level help in the future.

I believe it's very likely that Microsoft will announce a cloud platform this year that is similar to Google's App Engine. Sun may do the same. It would be easier for MS and Sun to support multiple programming languages because all applications would run on the JVM or the .NET framework.

Yes, of all of those guys, I think Microsoft are most likely next to act, as it would also be the perfect opportunity for them to offer any cloud-based Office products they may or may not be developing :)

Actually IBM has "Blue Cloud" (it even made Techcrunch ! see http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/15/ibms-blue-cloud-is-web-...)

But you're right it's a very high-end offering, so you're not gonna' see it mentioned much in the bootstrapped startup world.

btw, when are you coming back to Hursley ? ;-)

That's interesting, I stand corrected - it is interesting how the trend has cycled between centralised and distributed compute resources over the decades, and IBM's been on the ride the whole time.

btw, when are you leaving Hursley ? ;-)

Suns Jini+JavaSpaces was good a few years ago. Was sad to see them drop it though.

Can you talk more about the edge cases and problems/solutions in your next blogs?

Great article, thanks guys.

It's off-topic newbie question but I haven't find the right place to ask: does anybody know if HAProxy work with ASP.NET websites?

It sure does (I've personally done it).

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