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I'll bet other companies (e.g. Heroku, Dropbox) that use AWS/EC2 would have similar things to say. I did have this one question, being a guy with an IT backgro

by sabat 16y ago

I'll bet other companies (e.g. Heroku, Dropbox) that use AWS/EC2 would have similar things to say. I did have this one question, being a guy with an IT background: they expected stability? Really? I always expect host/app/system failure, and am pleasantly surprised when it doesn't happen.

Travis 16y ago
My take on their experience was that they had only sort of abstractly thought about stability. Then they severely underestimated the variance in performance. Before moving to Amazon, stability was something you worked at in the lower levels, e.g., hardware, power, etc. Once you move to amazon, stability cannot be controlled at a lower level, so you have to make your application code more robust. With your own IT infrastructure, you'd logically put the focus into improving the reliability on your hardware stack, rather than just focusing on handling those issues in software.
easp 16y ago
One difference is that Heroku and similar are fairly young companies, whose infrastructure was largely built in "the cloud" and for "the cloud." Whatever preconceptions the builders had about the charactaristics of the underlying environment, they started learning the reality and adapting to it relatively early in the project. Netflix is a sizable and successful business. It's more than a decade old. Their streaming business launched only 4 years ago, more than 6 months before EC2's general availability, and almost 2 years before EBS, and it would be even longer before any of it was a reasonable choice for a company of their size, launching a new service building off their existing customer base, that had to succeed to allow the company to navigate a major transition that the company had been planning for for years. The similarities and differences in their experiences would be interesting and probably informative, particularly if considered against the vastly different starting points.

by sabat 16y ago

Travis 16y ago

My take on their experience was that they had only sort of abstractly thought about stability. Then they severely underestimated the variance in performance. Before moving to Amazon, stability was something you worked at in the lower levels, e.g., hardware, power, etc. Once you move to amazon, stability cannot be controlled at a lower level, so you have to make your application code more robust. With your own IT infrastructure, you'd logically put the focus into improving the reliability on your hardware stack, rather than just focusing on handling those issues in software.

easp 16y ago

One difference is that Heroku and similar are fairly young companies, whose infrastructure was largely built in "the cloud" and for "the cloud." Whatever preconceptions the builders had about the charactaristics of the underlying environment, they started learning the reality and adapting to it relatively early in the project. Netflix is a sizable and successful business. It's more than a decade old. Their streaming business launched only 4 years ago, more than 6 months before EC2's general availability, and almost 2 years before EBS, and it would be even longer before any of it was a reasonable choice for a company of their size, launching a new service building off their existing customer base, that had to succeed to allow the company to navigate a major transition that the company had been planning for for years. The similarities and differences in their experiences would be interesting and probably informative, particularly if considered against the vastly different starting points.