snewman

39 ms·

331.
by snewman 12y ago
Can you walk me through a concrete example of cost savings? Every time I look at something like SoftLayer, it doesn't seem to offer much of a savings compared to a corresponding EC2 reserved instance. Sure, you can do way better than E
332.
by snewman 12y ago
We started with Java because the rest of our backend is written in Java. We stuck with it because it has not turned out to be much of a bottleneck in practice. This came as a surprise; I had expected that we'd need to rewrite the subst
333.
by snewman 12y ago
Hi! Great to see this pop back up on HN. I'm the author of the blog post (and Scalyr founder), happy to answer any questions. Downthread, someone mentioned that they couldn't find the HN discussion from when this was originally po
334.
by snewman 12y ago
If you're open to commercial solutions, there are several SaaS choices that are quite cheap at low log volume. For instance, Scalyr (500MB/day for $19/month), LogEntries (free up to 167MB/day), or Papertrail (33MB/d
335.
In a New Approach to Fighting Disease, Helpful Genetic Mutations Are Sought(mobile.nytimes.com)
1 points by snewman 12y ago|0 comments
336.
by snewman 12y ago
(47 year old technical founder here; about to plug my startup so feel free to skip) Maybe this is true in general but it's not true everywhere. We're looking for a few great engineers, are happy to pay what they're worth, and
337.
by snewman 12y ago
Sometimes. I've had poor luck selling reservations, especially if the instance type is no longer current (as often happens). I've had instances sit on the market for the better part of a year, at less than half "list price&qu
338.
by snewman 12y ago
"No Upfront - You pay nothing upfront but commit to pay for the Reserved Instance over the course of the Reserved Instance term". Presumably, you'll be billed each month (for 12 months) whether you're using it or not. Of
339.
by snewman 12y ago
Summary: Amazon just announced a new pricing model for reserved instances. At a quick glance, it appears to be better in some scenarios, worse in others. For instance, the "No Upfront" option gives a 30% to 50% discount from on de
340.
Simplifying the EC2 Reserved Instance Model(aws.amazon.com)
12 points by snewman 12y ago|5 comments
341.
by snewman 12y ago
A rule of thumb is that $1 in sales/marketing expense should get you at least $1 in additional gross profit over the next 12 months. Depending on how much of that $47M was new revenue, it sounds like they're in decent shape on tha
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by snewman 12y ago
Great Things require dedication, passion, and vision. Working yourself to death is not on the list of requirements, and in fact can often be counter-productive. If you're passionate about your job, you're likely to work hard. But
343.
by snewman 12y ago
I'm not sure how impressed I am by Marc's arguments. For instance: > Another classic Krugman rhetorical maneuver. According to Paul, keeping prices low is a sign of monopoly power, but of course he’d also say that keeping price
344.
by snewman 12y ago
According to the article, they are already doing that.
345.
by snewman 12y ago
A good postmortem... and a clear example of a Type 1 Outage. There are pretty much only two kinds of outage in a decently-run system: 1. Two or three things go wrong at once. Some of the problems are spontaneous, and some were always broken
346.
by snewman 12y ago
(Author here) I can see that the title comes off as too grandiose out of context. Sorry about that; I was looking at it from a different angle when I wrote the article. The idea is that in normal work, you often run into challenges that see
347.
by snewman 12y ago
"Reframing the problem" is often easier in the virtual world. When someone does come along with a good reframing in the physical world, the results can sometimes be very dramatic though.
348.
by snewman 12y ago
Light utilization reserved instances IMHO is the best-kept secret in EC2. You get most of the savings of heavy utilization, with much less up-front commitment. Look at my figures above: light utilization costs only $98/month more than
349.
by snewman 12y ago
Digital Ocean is interesting, but they don't really come out cheaper for large, continuous-duty instances. Their tiny servers look great, if you don't need much storage. But on the larger instances, it's a straight $1/GB
350.
by snewman 12y ago
I want to want this, but the pricing just doesn't seem competitive with EC2. Am I missing something? For example, compare the "I/O" server with an EC2 i2.4xlarge instance. The Rackspace server has 128GB RAM, 3.2TB disk,
351.
by snewman 12y ago
Agreed -- SLAs are a pet peeve of mine. I wrote a post [0] about this a few years ago, it still feels fairly current. Basically, I don't think SLAs are a useful tool for managing service provider relationships; it's too difficult
352.
by snewman 12y ago
Yes, you can go down that road [0], and in some applications it's a good approach. However, it adds quite a bit of complexity, and the cost for creating and storing the index is substantial. For us, it doesn't pencil out to a win.
353.
by snewman 12y ago
We'd certainly be open to that if asked. We practice Complaint Driven Development [0] when it comes to API integrations and the like -- we prioritize what our customers ask for. For our core experience, we went with a custom agent beca
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by snewman 12y ago
Exactly; "fancy" is relative. It's a bit tricky, but it's nothing like the complexity of maintaining and using a keyword index. The reference implementation given in the article we linked to is thirty-odd lines of code.
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by snewman 12y ago
Indeed, in the not too distant future we expect to move to spinning disks, with the data arranged for streaming reads. Streaming off disk can be pretty fast. LZ4 compression is fast enough to give us another big boost without turning CPU in
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Searching 20 GB/sec: Systems Engineering Before Algorithms(blog.scalyr.com)
203 points by snewman 12y ago|85 comments
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by snewman 12y ago
The converse: advances in automotive engineering have made cars more reliable and efficient, with the unfortunate but tolerable side effect of making them internally more complex and inaccessible.
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by snewman 12y ago
Old cars: you could fix it yourself. Modern cars: rarely need fixing; also much more efficient. I know which I prefer.
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by snewman 12y ago
Hmm. Perhaps, for the scenario I'm describing, the key is simply to get away from my desk (and thus, away from heat-of-the-moment coding). The actual walking around might be irrelevant or worse. I could believe that... though the walk
360.
by snewman 12y ago
Another great thing about "walking around with a problem" is that it forces you to think before acting -- since you can't act until you get back to your desk. You know those moments when you're in the thick of coding, an

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