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5 years ago I built our own company CDN using bare metal clusters hosted in multiple POP's that was 1/10th the cost of using commercial CDN's. It brought us ahe

5 years ago I built our own company CDN using bare metal clusters hosted in multiple POP's that was 1/10th the cost of using commercial CDN's. It brought us ahead by literally hundreds of thousands of dollars per year and it serves us extremely well (continues to this day). The problem is that I am the CEO of the company which has now expanded to 45 people and to date, I've been unsuccessful at assigning a team to manage this piece of tech due to economics. At the point where I have to get engineers to work on the CDN, it becomes cheaper to move to a commercial CDN where it becomes someone else's problem. But at the moment, it ain't broke, the team loves the stability of it and it continues to save us hundreds of thousands of dollars every year....

terminal625 7y ago
woah, are you the ceo of artstation? I like that site
- leonardteo 7y ago
  Yessir, reporting in. Thanks for the thumbs up.
  - Atomskun 7y ago
    Great, could you tell your Android contractor: - "Magazine" in the sidebar just shows "No internet connection" (which is wrong) when clicking on it. - Why can't the app remember my Filter settings? I'm only interested in digital 2D when on the "Browse" screen, but I have to apply the filter every single time I open the app. - On Browse selected, click on Search, type in anything (e.g. Blender), then "View All Projects." Scroll through the first "page" (so that results show up that weren't on the screen before). Now these results begin to show up duplicated later when continuing scrolling (I assume pagination and/or the RecyclerView is implemented incorrectly). - The app doesn't seem to cache images. Click on any project. Let the image load. Hit back. Click the same project again. The image needs to load again. Looking at it again, some UI elements feel kind of uncanny which makes me think that the app isn't full native. There are some other small things that make the app look a little bit unpolished which I think a site like ArtStation doesn't deserve.
    - leonardteo 7y ago
      I’ve sent this over for the team to take a look, thanks.
iagovar 7y ago
Is the stack too complicated? I mean from a layman perspective id doesn't look like fancy tech, am I wrong?
- leonardteo 7y ago
  It depends on who is working on it. :) For devs who are comfortable with bare/close-to-metal clusters and networking, it's really not complex (and why over the years it's just not been an issue for me to just hack on it on the side). But for other devs, just the context switching from working on application domains becomes an overhead you can't ignore. Then when you factor in all the other overheads of assigning a "team" to it which includes scrum events, refinement, just talking about it ends up driving the cost up. It is a little bit more complex now - e.g. I added on-the-fly image resizing routines. But the core concepts of caching on multiple pops, being able the purge, etc. no it is not fancy tech by any stretch of the imagination.
cs02rm0 7y ago
Something to turn into a product? Economies of scale could help staff it then?
- leonardteo 7y ago
  It's something to think about! :)
- gowld 7y ago
  What product? A CDN?

terminal625 7y ago

woah, are you the ceo of artstation? I like that site

leonardteo 7y ago
Yessir, reporting in. Thanks for the thumbs up.
- Atomskun 7y ago
  Great, could you tell your Android contractor: - "Magazine" in the sidebar just shows "No internet connection" (which is wrong) when clicking on it. - Why can't the app remember my Filter settings? I'm only interested in digital 2D when on the "Browse" screen, but I have to apply the filter every single time I open the app. - On Browse selected, click on Search, type in anything (e.g. Blender), then "View All Projects." Scroll through the first "page" (so that results show up that weren't on the screen before). Now these results begin to show up duplicated later when continuing scrolling (I assume pagination and/or the RecyclerView is implemented incorrectly). - The app doesn't seem to cache images. Click on any project. Let the image load. Hit back. Click the same project again. The image needs to load again. Looking at it again, some UI elements feel kind of uncanny which makes me think that the app isn't full native. There are some other small things that make the app look a little bit unpolished which I think a site like ArtStation doesn't deserve.
  - leonardteo 7y ago
    I’ve sent this over for the team to take a look, thanks.

iagovar 7y ago

Is the stack too complicated? I mean from a layman perspective id doesn't look like fancy tech, am I wrong?

leonardteo 7y ago
It depends on who is working on it. :) For devs who are comfortable with bare/close-to-metal clusters and networking, it's really not complex (and why over the years it's just not been an issue for me to just hack on it on the side). But for other devs, just the context switching from working on application domains becomes an overhead you can't ignore. Then when you factor in all the other overheads of assigning a "team" to it which includes scrum events, refinement, just talking about it ends up driving the cost up. It is a little bit more complex now - e.g. I added on-the-fly image resizing routines. But the core concepts of caching on multiple pops, being able the purge, etc. no it is not fancy tech by any stretch of the imagination.

cs02rm0 7y ago

Something to turn into a product? Economies of scale could help staff it then?

leonardteo 7y ago
It's something to think about! :)
gowld 7y ago
What product? A CDN?