Handling Flash Crowds From Your Garage 74
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:Misleading pretense (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you overestimate the attention span of the type of people who compulsively install Facebook apps.
The hard part is realizing that you need to scale (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Misleading pretense (Score:4, Insightful)
The first crowd is a different class of user from the general public. It's a small subset of the Facebook usership that forwards almost everything they receive to everyone they know. Pandering to that particular crowd is a Facebook developer's foremost goal, because they are the ones who will drive exponential growth, if it's going to happen at all.
I think market research will show that this core group of irritating people are just as capricious with the "block app" button as with the "forward". So assuming your idea is good enough to spread among the primary group, your first chance is generally the only one you get.
most successful sites (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Good old MS at work again... (Score:1, Insightful)