Celebrity Deathmatch: Facebook vs. EC2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36482

by sanj • 19 years ago

1 4 19 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm wondering what the YC crowd thinks of Amazon's web services (S3 and EC2) as a means to handle Facebook traffic.

The pmarca blog entry about facebook intoned

"the Facebook Platform is primarily for use by either big companies, or venture-backed startups with the funding and capability to handle the slightly insane scale requirements. Individual developers are going to have a very hard time taking advantage of it in useful ways."

Can EC2 and a considered strategy to distribute load across [Amazon's] servers mitigate this?

Are there other tools and services that scale with usage in this way?

Anyone have experience with them?

sanj2• 19 years ago

My question appears to have sunk without a trace.

I'm surprised because it seems like an issue many folks should be worrying about!

run4yourlives• 19 years ago

The title is horrible... that's probably what did you in.

willarson• 19 years ago

EC2 could help avoid the cost of having dedicated servers to handle the potentially massive (and more likely extremely small) traffic from FaceBook. This wouldn't be too hard, just have one dedicated server and a box running a load balancer which would automatically spawn EC2 instances if the average load got too high (and kill them if they got too low).

Although its easy to outline this solution, I do think it would be difficult for a lone individual to develop their application along with maintaining the scaling aspects of it. Worse, I think that the Facebook platform is not a very rewarding venue to pursue for a small company, especially one that would be risking a meaningful portion of their funding on it.

sanj2• 19 years ago

But isn't Facebook just a single example of anything viral? More generally, I'm interested in hedging bets against capital costs.

Celebrity Deathmatch: Facebook vs. EC2

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