Cloudweavers » scalability

breathing space

pascal.charest — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:20:32 +0000

Last couples of weeks been pretty crazy. The number of drafts I’ve got prepared for this blog keep growing while my time to edit/publish them seem to strangely dissolve in the event around me. I’ve done my share of ‘This blog will get the time it deserve’ quite enough to know not to do that anymore. I won’t apologize for having a full schedule, I’ll just outline why I got one so full:

– Les Laboratoires Phoenix welcomes a new managed client, at the same time as I got my two first contractual employee (with enough job to drive them for years).
– I’ll be giving a talk at ConFoo, March 12th, called ‘Massive Scalability’. Be there, its going to be a pretty good one.
– I’ve been mandated to write another article for the European edition of Linux+DVD. Deadline is in a couples days.
– I’ve started dancing classes. (No comments please ;-))
– With the wedding happening soon, we are totally swamped with stuff to do. From food tasting to getting whatever I will wear, going through hotel reservation, decoration choices… By themself, each task is quite easy to manage, but add to that the fact we are doing most of it remotely and that Catherine schedule is just crazy.

At least, this morning, I’ve got a 20 minutes break, waiting for the bus thats going to take me to Montreal – on yet another ‘business trip’.

Amazon EBS (Elastic Block store) is out!

pascal.charest — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 13:56:28 +0000

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides block level storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes are off-instance storage that persists independently from the life of an instance. Amazon Elastic Block Store provides highly available, highly reliable storage volumes that can be attached to a running Amazon EC2 instance and exposed as a device within the instance. Amazon EBS is particularly suited for applications that require a database, file system, or access to raw block level storage.

source: Amazon AWS

scalability

pascal.charest — Thu, 22 May 2008 02:47:53 +0000

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.