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The real benefits of AWS is scale on demand, if you need it. Formspring reached 1 million users in 45 days. How do you plan for this on typical hardware? Espec

by iampims 14y ago

The real benefits of AWS is scale on demand, if you need it. Formspring reached 1 million users in 45 days. How do you plan for this on typical hardware? Especially when you had no idea ANYONE would use your little side project? AWS isn't cheap. It offers building blocks upon which you can "easily" build and scale a website. Not for everyone, but good enough for us.

vizzah 14y ago
Do you always have to operate expecting sudden spikes and that prevents you from moving to a cheaper hardware? If traffic gets over what you could serve, display 'our servers are busy' message and perhaps that way you could have kept the service alive if costs halved..
- 18pfsmt 14y ago
  I think the plan is that if you have to manage costs as closely you describe (as you or I might), your revenue opportunities are too small to care about in comparison with the founders' expectations of a giant exit. Many of us are not even playing the same game.
- iampims 14y ago
  > Do you always have to operate expecting sudden spikes and that prevents you from moving to a cheaper hardware? In short, yes. This is inherent to the nature of Formspring – or to some extent social networks. Since most of your actions on the site are being `broadcasted` to all your followers, and since the distribution of followers follows a pareto distribution, it is very difficult to predict load at any given time, as one single action by a very popular user could trigger hundreds of millions of events (publishing to everybody's stream, sending emails, push notifications, updating counters, spam filtering, etc.) We benefit greatly from the elasticity of AWS, and `scale up` accordingly to deliver this event in a timely manner. If we were not concerned by `delivery time`, we would be able to smooth it out, but at the expense of engagement… and as you can imagine, engagement in a social network is quite important :)

by iampims 14y ago

vizzah 14y ago

Do you always have to operate expecting sudden spikes and that prevents you from moving to a cheaper hardware? If traffic gets over what you could serve, display 'our servers are busy' message and perhaps that way you could have kept the service alive if costs halved..

18pfsmt 14y ago
I think the plan is that if you have to manage costs as closely you describe (as you or I might), your revenue opportunities are too small to care about in comparison with the founders' expectations of a giant exit. Many of us are not even playing the same game.
iampims 14y ago
> Do you always have to operate expecting sudden spikes and that prevents you from moving to a cheaper hardware? In short, yes. This is inherent to the nature of Formspring – or to some extent social networks. Since most of your actions on the site are being `broadcasted` to all your followers, and since the distribution of followers follows a pareto distribution, it is very difficult to predict load at any given time, as one single action by a very popular user could trigger hundreds of millions of events (publishing to everybody's stream, sending emails, push notifications, updating counters, spam filtering, etc.) We benefit greatly from the elasticity of AWS, and `scale up` accordingly to deliver this event in a timely manner. If we were not concerned by `delivery time`, we would be able to smooth it out, but at the expense of engagement… and as you can imagine, engagement in a social network is quite important :)