Comments on: Lessons from SlideShare: Cloud Computing Fiascos & How to Avoid Them

By: omis.me » Happy Birthday SlideShare

omis.me » Happy Birthday SlideShare — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 16:56:28 +0000

[...] is one of the most underrated and under appreciated Web startups. Great job — Rashmi Sinha and Jon Boutelle, who have become great dosa-muching friends over the years. Congrats and here is looking at many [...]

By: del.icio.us bookmarks for September 8th through September 20th |

del.icio.us bookmarks for September 8th through September 20th | — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 15:39:50 +0000

[...] But if comic books have taught us anything at all, it’s that with great power comes great resp... - %extended% [...]

By: Pradeep Padala

Pradeep Padala — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 17:13:27 +0000

I see, I haven't used Webby, but seems like a good tool. How do you use it to control your Amazon instances?

By: Jonathan Boutelle

Jonathan Boutelle — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 21:20:07 +0000

Yeah we have a "free-fire" zone for developers ... a completely separate account. People can do anything they want, but everything gets wiped out at the end of the workday.

But for production that approach obviously doesn't help much...

By: Jaroslav Gergic

Jaroslav Gergic — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 21:09:23 +0000

Could you be more specific about the task you were trying to solve with Hadoop? I mean the analytical use case, data model and data volume. It would be interesting to give it a spin on our platform. The machine numbers you mention in the post are frightening.

By: dean

dean — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:38:40 +0000

Ouch!

The approach we took with Blabbelon was to put the hosting account on a credit card with a reduced ($2k/month) limit. That enabled us to go nuts during testing, let the whole thing fail (it self-scales, so the risk is that a bug meant the system could go and buy itself a load of servers we didn't really need).

So another useful fail-safe is to ensure that your credit card will start bouncing before the "system" has the opportunity to go completely ballistic....

By: Gaurav Mantri

Gaurav Mantri — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:35:54 +0000

Interesting read. I guess people would easily get carried away with the promise of cheap storage (which is kind of true) and don't realize it gets added day by day. I would be very interested in knowing what do you mean by "working on software processing the xml". Are you writing some kind of analytical software which will tell you about your storage usage?

By: Carlos Taborda

Carlos Taborda — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:11:45 +0000

Pradeep,

We have tools in place to alert us and the customer if too many webbies have been added. We don't have any open source tools for this at this point, its all part of our webby manager system.

Out of curiosity, how many instances do you own with Amazon on a permanent basis?

By: Jonathan Boutelle

Jonathan Boutelle — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:11:07 +0000

Amazon provides the data in xml form and csv form for download. We're working on software to process the xml. Unfortunately, a human needs to download it: AWS doesn't provide any APIs for doing this!

By: Carlos Taborda

Carlos Taborda — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 17:35:04 +0000

Ouch, thats why implementing a confirmation email once a customer goes over a certain limit is key.