4 ms·

Can't find a link for this, but one of the employees mentioned that it was related to Conde Nast's arcane rules about buying and managing servers.

nostromo 16y ago
This is one of those cases where it's totally appropriate to just do what's right and lie to your parent company.
jedberg 16y ago
It has nothing to do with that. It is simply that EC2 offers us the best bang for the buck for our requirements (one of the main ones being able to spin up a lot of iron very quickly).
- tb 16y ago
  May I ask why you don't use another cheaper provider for fixed base load and reserve EC2 for peak load capacity? Is it that the overhead of running on two different providers not worth the money you'd save? Or is this something you've considered doing but haven't had the time to implement yet?
  - jedberg 16y ago
    > Is it that the overhead of running on two different providers not worth the money you'd save? Or is this something you've considered doing but haven't had the time to implement yet? Pretty much yes to both of these. With so few of us, the overhead of running it and moving to it just doesn't make sense at this time.
    - kwyjibo 16y ago
      You don't seem to really trying. You could be moving everything to one host and still be saving money.
- axod 16y ago
  Surely the traffic/load isn't that variable? Seems like even a VPS provider (linode/slicehost/etc) would offer far more bang for the buck. The pricing for bandwidth alone on EC2 is simply insane.
  - jedberg 16y ago
    Actually, it isn't so much the traffic. It's when something like Cassandra suddenly stops working correctly and we need to take emergency action to keep the site up by, for example, doubling our memcached pool temporarily. None of the VPS's can give us that many nodes that quickly. Also, bandwidth is by far our lowest cost. It is less than 5% of our total bill.
    - axod 16y ago
      >> "Also, bandwidth is by far our lowest cost. It is less than 5% of our total bill." I can't see why Reddit should be a particularly high CPU usage website. So perhaps time to optimize and swap out some things...

nostromo 16y ago

This is one of those cases where it's totally appropriate to just do what's right and lie to your parent company.

jedberg 16y ago

It has nothing to do with that. It is simply that EC2 offers us the best bang for the buck for our requirements (one of the main ones being able to spin up a lot of iron very quickly).

tb 16y ago
May I ask why you don't use another cheaper provider for fixed base load and reserve EC2 for peak load capacity? Is it that the overhead of running on two different providers not worth the money you'd save? Or is this something you've considered doing but haven't had the time to implement yet?
- jedberg 16y ago
  > Is it that the overhead of running on two different providers not worth the money you'd save? Or is this something you've considered doing but haven't had the time to implement yet? Pretty much yes to both of these. With so few of us, the overhead of running it and moving to it just doesn't make sense at this time.
  - kwyjibo 16y ago
    You don't seem to really trying. You could be moving everything to one host and still be saving money.
axod 16y ago
Surely the traffic/load isn't that variable? Seems like even a VPS provider (linode/slicehost/etc) would offer far more bang for the buck. The pricing for bandwidth alone on EC2 is simply insane.
- jedberg 16y ago
  Actually, it isn't so much the traffic. It's when something like Cassandra suddenly stops working correctly and we need to take emergency action to keep the site up by, for example, doubling our memcached pool temporarily. None of the VPS's can give us that many nodes that quickly. Also, bandwidth is by far our lowest cost. It is less than 5% of our total bill.
  - axod 16y ago
    >> "Also, bandwidth is by far our lowest cost. It is less than 5% of our total bill." I can't see why Reddit should be a particularly high CPU usage website. So perhaps time to optimize and swap out some things...