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How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL

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Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL

#31

Post by pbz »

robconery wrote: post #22
pbz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would've loved to see a rough breakdown of how they got the the "5 figures" cost...

SQL Server license: $7171 per processor - we have a single quad machine... which we'll likely need to split into two machines, incurring extra licensing fees. Our servers were hosted at MaximumASP and they gave us a bandwidth quote with additional servers that was 4 figures (remember, this is 3 years out). Visual Studio is $1200 a pop - this is for two people. I'm already at 5 figures and I didn't include Expression/…

So then why not just replace the database and keep the rest? Were you using Linq to SQL and hence tied to SQL Server? As far as VS I'm sure it would not have been a problem for you to get free versions. However, I suppose if you were to change the database portion, probably a sizable chunk of the application, you may as well replace the whole thing...

Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL

#32

Post by redstripe »

robconery wrote: post #22
pbz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would've loved to see a rough breakdown of how they got the the "5 figures" cost...

SQL Server license: $7171 per processor - we have a single quad machine... which we'll likely need to split into two machines, incurring extra licensing fees. Our servers were hosted at MaximumASP and they gave us a bandwidth quote with additional servers that was 4 figures (remember, this is 3 years out). Visual Studio is $1200 a pop - this is for two people. I'm already at 5 figures and I didn't include Expression/…

What is it about your database requirements that prevents you from using SQL server express?

Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL

#33

Post by matwood »

robconery wrote: post #22
pbz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would've loved to see a rough breakdown of how they got the the "5 figures" cost...

SQL Server license: $7171 per processor - we have a single quad machine... which we'll likely need to split into two machines, incurring extra licensing fees. Our servers were hosted at MaximumASP and they gave us a bandwidth quote with additional servers that was 4 figures (remember, this is 3 years out). Visual Studio is $1200 a pop - this is for two people. I'm already at 5 figures and I didn't include Expression/…

What did a full license of VS give you over just using the Express versions of the tools? From what I've seen unless you have a huge team and need the team features you could probably get by using the express versions.

I do agree with that the SQL server licensing is a huge PITA and in your case you really didn't need all its ancillary features and instead just needed a simple, fast data store.

The article was a great read.

Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL

#34

Post by redstripe »

riprock wrote: post #27
redstripe wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article is pretty short on costing details. Silverlight encoding aside (because that's competely unrelated to asp.net mvc deployment) you can deploy web sites really cheap on the microsoft stack. Windows Web Server: $400 SQL Server Express: Free (Databases have a 4 GB maximum size) I can't image how it would cost them 5 figures to use asp.net mvc. I find the productivity of the MS development stack to be well wo…

To be fair, Jeff and Joel are still on Bizspark. StackOverflow is ~2 years old.

And after 3 years if they need to spend 10k on licensing for a very successful site that will be peanuts compared to their own time spent. Or do they value that at nothing?

I think this is a bad article/interview because it gives the impression that you can't do websites in asp.net MVC on the cheap.

Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL

#35

Post by javery »

matthewking wrote: post #26
robconery wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SQL Server license: $7171 per processor - we have a single quad machine... which we'll likely need to split into two machines, incurring extra licensing fees. Our servers were hosted at MaximumASP and they gave us a bandwidth quote with additional servers that was 4 figures (remember, this is 3 years out). Visual Studio is $1200 a pop - this is for two people. I'm already at 5 figures and I didn't include Expression/…

Didn't look at Windows Azure as an option? http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/

We didn't seriously look at Azure for a couple reasons:

1) It's expensive compared to other hosting platforms. 2) I hate lock-in to a particular platform. If we coded against Azure tables we would be locked in to Azure. If we used their SQL platform we would be space constrained. 3) I have used Azure and deployment, updates, and troubleshooting are all slow and cumbersome. It is still a very immature platform.

Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL

#36

Post by javery »

redstripe wrote: post #32
robconery wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SQL Server license: $7171 per processor - we have a single quad machine... which we'll likely need to split into two machines, incurring extra licensing fees. Our servers were hosted at MaximumASP and they gave us a bandwidth quote with additional servers that was 4 figures (remember, this is 3 years out). Visual Studio is $1200 a pop - this is for two people. I'm already at 5 figures and I didn't include Expression/…

What is it about your database requirements that prevents you from using SQL server express?

Using SQL Server Express is just trading one time-bomb for another time-bomb. Now instead of a 3 year bizspark timebomb we have a size time-bomb, once we cross that point we are springing for SQL Server. Why use a stunted Express product when you can use MySQL or Postgres for free?

Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL

#37

Post by percept »

TomOfTTB wrote: post #23
percept wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of developers and managers I work with don't seem to realize that what's best for Microsoft isn't necessarily what's best for another company. Instead they get stuck in a cycle of adopting whatever MS throws down the channel (this week it's Entity Framework, last week SOA concepts, etc.). Good MS developers should learn to take what's best from the open source world and apply whatever is most useful behind the…

In fairness (and as the person who made the decision that forces Sam above to use .Net technology) there are reasons to use Microsoft technology even when it isn’t the best fit. Let’s be honest about technology for a second: Things go wrong. No matter what solution you use things go wrong and for the most part non-technical management doesn’t understand that. When something goes wrong they want someone to blame. If y…

Definitely, and in fairness these are situations where there's a huge investment in MS technologies, with entire teams dedicated to supporting and maintaining the infrastructure. It isn't feasible to throw it all away without a serious commitment from the highest levels of the organization, and a multi-year, multi-million-dollar implementation plan to do so.

But at the team and individual developer levels I think there's lots of room for good open source solutions, and this option isn't always considered because developers are looking to MS for the next big thing.

I believe this is reflected in the certification programs too, because they don't focus as much on building a sound programming foundation as on making good Microsoft evangelists. From Microsoft's viewpoint, why not? But it's that divergence again from the company's perspective.

Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL

#38

Post by javery »

awa wrote: post #24
archon wrote: post #4

My first question after reading the title was "Why?" From the article: "JA: All the problems we had (licensing, testing, deployments) could have been overcome. We could have used workarounds, written our own deployment framework, etc. What is comes down to is that we both really enjoy working with Rails and we enjoy the Rails community and the tools and libraries available. One of the best parts about running the sho…

Nope. FTA: RB: If the platform was holding up fine, what prompted the change of architecture? RC: Money.

Rob (RC) and I (JA) tend to disagree on things all the time. For me it wasn't as much about the money as the pleasure of using Rails, and I know Rob also loves using Rails. The money was basically what made the decision easy, here were our choices:

1) Continue to use a platform that costs more and isn't as much fun.

or

2) Use a platform we both love using and works out to be cheaper.

Pretty simple decision really.

Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL

#39

Post by javery »

redstripe wrote: post #34
riprock wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, Jeff and Joel are still on Bizspark. StackOverflow is ~2 years old.

And after 3 years if they need to spend 10k on licensing for a very successful site that will be peanuts compared to their own time spent. Or do they value that at nothing? I think this is a bad article/interview because it gives the impression that you can't do websites in asp.net MVC on the cheap.

You are assuming that we would spend more time using RoR then ASP.NET, we have found this to be the opposite. We build out and deploy features in much less time then we would on ASP.NET now.

Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL

#40

Post by euroclydon »

squidsoup wrote: post #28
robconery wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has nothing to do with the technology - it's good stuff and we could have made it work fine. The issue is we want to stay small and not take on the associated cost. I can see how it might come off like I'm damning the platform - that was hardly my intention. Rails has had 3+ years of Open Source contribution to build out the platform and make it do amazing things - ASP.NET MVC will (hopefully) grow in some of the…

Rob, I've always enjoyed reading your posts as I've personally been straddling the gap between the two worlds (MS and OSS) for a long time now. Primarily this is due to our local job market - there simply aren't any OSS jobs where I live, and Microsoft is very deeply embedded in the New Zealand marketplace. C# is a fine language, and ASP.Net MVC is a great framework, but I can't help but feel like the 'other kids' ar…

BDD on .NET? Check out the S#arp Architecture, it's designed to be the RoR of the .NET world, and it has some nice BDD tools, plus scaffolding for IoC, Unit Tests, Services, and MVC.

http://wiki.sharparchitecture.net

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