Infinite Scalability with Amazon Web Services?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=374494

by espadagroup • 18 years ago

4 8 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

From a startup junkie, but a non-hacker:

Is it possible to build a truly scalable application with all of the Amazon's Web Services? What would be the biggest problem? Is it a technical problem, in that Amazon's services just don't cover everything or is it more that we don't have perfect foresight into where the bottle necks will be?

vorador• 18 years ago

Scalability isn't inherent to Amazon's architecture. It depends of your app. A poorly written app won't scale.

jwilliams• 18 years ago

Not only that - but certain classes of problem won't scale (linearly).

If you wanted to produce a site that outputs static, immutable, invariant, fixed content... then yeah, probably would scale (approaching) infinity.

espadagroup• 18 years ago

Ok, that makes sense to me I was always wondering if it was a perfect foresight problem, which it seems to be rather than a lack of services from Amazon. However, is it possible to get to the point of scalability where it is just a hardware issue rather than a restructuring of code issue? Or are the code methods one would implement to allow such scalability overkill in the early stages?

cperciva• 18 years ago

Right now, I'd say that the biggest limit to scalability with AWS is the lack of load balancing. They've said that this will be coming in the future; but it's not here yet.

wmf• 18 years ago

You can do software load balancing, but you'd eventually be bottlenecked by the 1 Gbps per instance limit. You could use round-robin DNS for multiple load-balancer instances, but that feels a little kludgy.

Lack of geographical distribution and impossibility of decent HA might kick in before you had to worry about load balancing gigabits of traffic, though.

cmer• 18 years ago

Just an idea, if the 1 Gbps limit is a problem for your load balancer, you could just start serving static files through a CDN, therefore freeing up quite a bit of bandwidth for dynamically generated stuff.

It's a good problem to have, though!

prakash• 18 years ago

There are various levels of Scalabilty, AWS being one of them in a chain.

Hosting > AWS > CDN's like Akamai > building out your data center similar to google.

AWS is a good start, and if you start doing 100's of Gbps of traffic you should probably start looking for other options.

As the other HN commenters have mentioned, you have to architect you application with scalability baked in. Some applications aren't good candidates for scalable applications such as many 1-1 live streams.

sh1mmer• 18 years ago

I've heard this question a lot when people ask me about what Yahoo are going to be offering in the cloud.

A lot of people don't understand the difference between Amazon's and Google/Microsoft's approach to cloud offerings.

Amazon seem to be providing a lot of infrastructure pieces, from virtulization to storage and CDN to RDMS. However how you connect those pieces or which you use it's pretty much up to you.

Google on the other (and Microsoft judging by the current descriptions of Azure) have provided a platform which guides developers towards good practices with constraints but is more limited in the possible applications. That said they won't make your application performs, they'll just make sure it fits in their scalable architecture.

So the short answer is yes. You can build a truly scalable application on any or all of these cloud services if you know how. If you know how, though, you can probably do it without them.

Infinite Scalability with Amazon Web Services?

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