15 ms·
If you really could have built it in a few days, you should come work for FathomDB! I would point out that doing this properly on EC2 is an order of magnitude
by justinsb 18y ago
If you really could have built it in a few days, you should come work for FathomDB!
I would point out that doing this properly on EC2 is an order of magnitude harder than doing it on dedicated hardware; the assumption on EC2 has to be that things will fail and you have to build accordingly.
The simplicity of the web-based GUI and the offering hides the complexity going on under the surface. But that's the whole point of FathomDB: you just use the database, and you don't see (or care about) the hoops we're jumping through to make it all work.
- modoc 18y agoIt sounds like my ignorance of EC2 led me to believe that your service was simpler than it really is. I meant no offense.
- timf 18y ago"doing this properly on EC2 is an order of magnitude harder than doing it on dedicated hardware; the assumption on EC2 has to be that things will fail and you have to build accordingly" I don't follow, how is that different from dedicated hardware where you also have to assume failure will happen? If anything I'd argue it's the opposite (but ultimately note that I think both take some work). But I say that it's perhaps the opposite because on EC2, you have EBS: "volumes that operate with 20 GB or less of modified data since their most recent Amazon EBS snapshot can expect an annual failure rate (AFR) of between 0.1% – 0.5%, where failure refers to a complete loss of the volume. This compares with commodity hard disks that will typically fail with an AFR of around 4%" And neither failure rate involves RAID which you can of course do with both EBS (mdadm) and disks to go for lower AFR projections.