Marc Andreessen: Analyzing the Facebook Platform, three weeks in

Re:Marc Andreessen: Analyzing the Facebook Platform, three ... by natrius on Tuesday June 12, 2007 @02:03PM (#27534)

His fourth point, that any good Facebook apps will be killed by the traffic, is a pretty interesting one. In one sense, Facebook Platform lowers the barrier to entry for developers by making it insanely easy to spread the word about a new application, but it's so successful at doing so that you have to have enough physical infrastructure to handle that load. This seems like a perfect use case for Amazon's EC2 and S3, but as he notes, iLike wasn't able to use them to solve all of their traffic problems. Does anyone know of any particular problems inherent in the way Facebook Platform and Amazon's services are set up that makes it difficult to use them together?

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Re:Marc Andreessen: Analyzing the Facebook Platform, three ... by elq on Tuesday June 12, 2007 @04:13PM (#27589)

Most people don't build their apps to work with an infrastructure like EC2. Or. Their apps can't easily fit into the EC2 model.

In essence, how is EC2 different?

1- Each EC2 instance is essentially 1/4th of a typical server (w/ 4 cores, 16GB ram, 1GB net, ~500G local disk).

2- once an EC2 instance fails, it's gone forever - there is no way to recover local data, you'll never get the same IP addr, etc.

Given these two constraints, EC2 isn't really a viable platform for running services backed by an typical RDBMS (though, I'm sure it can be pulled off, it would be quite a bit of work).

EC2 is _really_ good for apps that "pull" work from a queue - i.e. operate asynchronously.

There are several companies using EC2 with this asnyc idiom, Powerset being the most notable.

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Re:Marc Andreessen: Analyzing the Facebook Platform, three ... by falsestprophet on Wednesday June 20, 2007 @06:05PM (#29674)

Would immediately storing data and sessions to S3 be problematic?

Is it a better idea to use an external machine as a load balancer and an automatic EC2 instance manager?

Is it reasonable to try to build a traditional functional web application in this asynchronous paradigm?

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Re:Marc Andreessen: Analyzing the Facebook Platform, three ... by hacker64 on Wednesday June 13, 2007 @03:26AM (#27726)

It won't be long before a viable option to accomodate fast growth is availale. S3 does a great job scaling storage, and Amazon is already planning to make EC2 easier to use for web applications.

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