load balancing

Ynet on AWS. Let's hope we don't have to test their limits.

In Israel, more than in most places, no news is good news. Ynet, one of the largest news sites in Israel, recently posted a case study (at the bottom of this article) on handling large loads by moving their notification services to AWS.

"We used EC2, Elastic Load Balancers, and EBS... Us as an enterprise, we need something stable..."

They are contradicting themselves in my opinion. EBS and Elastic Load Balancers (ELB) are the two AWS services which fail the most and fail hardest with multiple downtimes spanning multiple days each.

EBS: Conceptually flawed, prone to cascading failures

How to Host a Screaming Fast Site for $0.03/Month

I had an idea. That's always how it starts. Before I know it, I've purchased the domain name and I'm futzing around with some HTML but where am I going to host it and how much is this going to end up costing me?

That's where I was when I came up with#DonateMyFee. "This is a site that is only going to cost me money", I thought to myself (the whole point is for people to donate money rather than paying me). I really didn't want to start shelling out big (or small) bucks on hosting.

Long story short, here is the recipe for a screaming fast website on a low budget:

Vendor Lock-In or One Stop Shop

I was recently discussing load balancers with someone. I said I was much happier with F5 than I was with Cisco and he countered that although he preferred F5 head to head, going with Cisco for all the network was better for them in the long run.

The situation with storage is similar. EMC makes a great SAN but a pretty bad NAS. Is it worth getting EMC's NAS for the One Stop Shop factor?

When 99.999% Isn't Good Enough

When discussing availability of a service, it is common to hear the term "Five Nines" referring to a service being available 99.999% of the time but "Five Nines" are relative. If your time frame is a week, then your service can be unavailable for 6.05 seconds whereas a time frame of a year, allows for a very respectable 5.26 minutes.

In reality, none of those calculations are relevant because no one cares if a service is unavailable for 10 hours, as long as they aren't trying to use it. On the other hand, if you're handling 50,000 transactions per second, 6.05 seconds of unavailability could cost you 302,500 transactions and no one cares if you met your SLA.

This problem is one I've come up against a number of times in the past and recently even more and the issue is orders of magnitude in IT. The larger the volume of business you handle, the less relevant the Five Nines become.