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."

Re:Astro Turf

[nmb3000]

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 [microsoft.com] (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.

Mixed tech history metaphor

[Mathinker]

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...

Re:The method:

[pimpimpim]

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.

Re:The method:

[mr_matticus]

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.

Re:Brand protection:

[Anonymous Coward]

The canonical example is "Photoshop". It predates google considerably. HTH.

You seem to have misspelled Xerox.

Kevin

or download the pdf

[CBravo]

http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix08/tech/full_papers/elson/elson.pdf [usenix.org]