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A comment on Marc Andreessen: Analyzing the Facebook Platform, three weeks in. Parent comment

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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