LiveBlog: 2 Years Later, Loving and Hating the Cloud
More from Velocity 2009
Justin Huff, Picknik (online photo editor)
Used AWS for 2 years, 1.5 in production
Hybrid app: small cage in Seattle + EC2/S3 for some parts of infra
Gives flexibility
Picnik has a spiky profile based on usage; EC2 allows to cover that
- They use a lot of
Capacity management (not planning)
- easily repurpose between webserver and asynch jobs
- Can buy hardware in batches, grow logically, get better deals
At one point had nearly 1B objects in S3
- Move old files to S3
- Put some new files to S3
- Put a lot more out there (had a knob to adjust, eventually reached S3)
- Profit? Not so much ..
Most S3 objs short lived, needed fast deletion, and mostly didn’t have it
Mostly ignored this problem in favor of other more important problems (db sharding, scaling web frontends, expanding). Spend money on it.
They have 1.5 ops people.
“At some point we started getting free airline tickets from FF mileage on AWS CC”
Non-cloud apps have predictable, controllable latency, etc. Not so much in the cloud.
Be ready for fail
- What if EC2 goes down? Have a knob for how much to go offline/reduce services
- Be ready for hard debugging: lots of visibility/instrumentation
Mostly, though, clouds help you ignore problems … until you can’t.
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