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."
Google? (Score:1, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org] after reading that first sentence?
Misleading pretense (Score:4, Interesting)
"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.
Brand protection: (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:The method: (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The method: (Score:3, Interesting)
Softlayer [softlayer.com] 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 [ezzi.net] -- 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.