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I had a meeting with a potential client today. He made me think when he said to me : “there is a lot of GNU/Linux sysadmin available to work in Montreal, why “you” ?”. While this is true and valid (GNU/Linux isn’t the “beast” it used to be), I think that we are seeing the same effect that has happen for years in the Windows universe : “Click + Click = functional server”.
A LAMP based stack can now be deployed in couple of seconds using most of the distribution available on the web. While having a Apache web server and a MySQL database might work for small domain (couple of “unused websites”), it doesn’t survive that well under the “web2.0 dynamic” charge.
Optimization of the code is good up to a point – and I think this is where most “good idea” fail. The cost of a developer for a week can be around 1400$ (think 35$ * 8 hours * 5 days). In comparison the cost of a single EC2 instance for a whole year is around 1600$ (each month: 50GB in, 500GB out – instance open 24/7). The online calculator is available here.
This mean that while code optimization might be interesting, the first thing web related application should do is to scale horizontally. The technology is available. There is a true plethora of technology available to scale web based infrastructure.
In the last couple of month, I’ve been working with some clients to build scalable infrastructures. The bottom line would be that everything can scale with the good infrastructure. One very good post about this statement has been done by on Nati Shalon’s blog (here, he is speaking of twitter).
In the next couples of days, I’ll be writing about some of those “scalable” systems.
tagged with : , cloud computing, freesoftware, opensource, scalability | permalink