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Are you sure your cloud supplier has everything in stock to add 100s, or 1000s of servers? I'm not sure how many servers Dropbox is up to now, but we've got ov
by zeeg 14y ago
Are you sure your cloud supplier has everything in stock to add 100s, or 1000s of servers?
I'm not sure how many servers Dropbox is up to now, but we've got over 200 physical machines (probably nearing 300, growing quickly), and much more when you break them down to how many virtual services there are running. We do that with 3 operations people.
The biggest advantage for us has been the ability to scale up, rather than worrying about how to scale out right now. For a startup, I'd say this is even more important. Horizontal scaling is one of the most difficult parts of my job. That's not saying that it's hard, but the fact is its straight up not as easy as just buying better hardware.
- sabat 14y agoAWS? Surely you just. Yes, AWS has thousands of servers ready to go at any time.
- rmoriz 14y agoWho pays for this massive amount of unused hardware? Is there a guarantee that you can access this hardware anytime in this quantity?
- kenneth_reitz 14y agoAmazon leases the unused space as "spot instances". You bid on the available space, and if capacity increases, your box goes away.
- pyre 14y ago> 1000s of servers When was the last time someone needed to add multiple 1000s of servers on-the-fly (i.e. 5 minutes ago)? Am I just naive to think that this would be a huge spike? If you're talking about getting 1000s of servers over a longer time frame, I'm pretty sure that AWS would be able to keep up.