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Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs

primevideotech.com

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Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs

#201

My word. I'm sort of gob smacked this article exists. I know there are nuances in the article, but my first impression was it's saying "we went back to basics and stopped using needless expensive AWS stuff that caused us to completely over architect our application and the results were much better". Which is good lesson, and a good story, but there's a kind of irony it's come from an internal Amazon team. As another…

>Microservices and serverless components are tools that do work at high scale, but whether to use them over monolith has to be made on a case-by-case basis.

Tldr build the right thing.

>"AWS sales and support teams continue to spend much of their time helping customers optimize AWS spend so they can weather this uncertain economy," Brian Olsavsky, Amazon's finance chief, said on a conference call with analysts.[0]

Amazon isn't afraid of this trend, they're embracing it. Better to cannibalise yourself than be disrupted by someone else

https://twitter.com/DanRose999/status/1287944667414196225?s=...

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/27/aws-q1-earnings-report-2023....

Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs

#202
I am big fan of django's apps model ... what I like to call a "Modular Monolith".

Being an early engineer at most of my stints, I have build and scaled multiple startups using the approach and it has never failed me, the pitfalls of micro-services is not worth it unless absolutely necessary.

I always made it a point to group by business-logic rather than separate at whatever curve ball "new-tech" throws at me.

Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs

#203
post #10

I'm pretty convinced that microservices are one of those things that make sense 5% of the time and the other 95% is cargo culting.

The problem is more like that many people don't understand the tradeoffs and when to use microservices. This becomes even more obvious when you ask them what their current architecture is and what problems they hope to solve for that needs a transition to another architecture.

Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To most people, "mono" refers to a single codebase, not a single deployed instance. I've worked on many monoliths that run multiple instances in production. Microservices are no more or less scalable than a monolith. The main benefit of Microservices is allowing multiple teams to work independently from each other without everyone "stepping on each others toes". You can have scalable monoliths and unscalable microser…

Thank you for clarifying. It's seems my definition doesn't correspond to others'. Then do we lack a word for a monolithic application that handles everything and that can only have one instance running?

"Singleton" sounds like a good word here (though I've never heard it used in that context)

Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs

#205

My word. I'm sort of gob smacked this article exists. I know there are nuances in the article, but my first impression was it's saying "we went back to basics and stopped using needless expensive AWS stuff that caused us to completely over architect our application and the results were much better". Which is good lesson, and a good story, but there's a kind of irony it's come from an internal Amazon team. As another…

Around 2008 the idea of microseconds were looked down on, until they weren’t.

The key is to look down on nothing, become competent with multiple architects and know which ones not to implement in a use case if the one to use isn’t clear right away

Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs

#206

Next they will transition to on premises hardware from the cloud to save another 90%.... oh wait...

I wouldn't be surprised if AWS started a on-prem hardware leasing service. Some company are providing "On-premise As A Servicse" solution.

Isn’t that what AWS Outposts are? Leased hardware with a subset of AWS services running on them.

Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs

#207

My word. I'm sort of gob smacked this article exists. I know there are nuances in the article, but my first impression was it's saying "we went back to basics and stopped using needless expensive AWS stuff that caused us to completely over architect our application and the results were much better". Which is good lesson, and a good story, but there's a kind of irony it's come from an internal Amazon team. As another…

It's been online for 2 weeks already.

Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you had AWS tech advisers advise teams in your company to go with this stack? Because I haven't. AWS doesn't have an equally distributed interest in selling all of its products. Some AWS products exist because customers need/demand them and others exist because they provide higher margins and tighter lock-in to Amazon: the first type of products are great for customer acquisition, the role of their sales folk is…

> Some AWS products exist because customers need/demand them and others exist because they provide higher margins and tighter lock-in to Amazon I'm still trying to figure out which one Aurora and Cognito fall under.

Aurora is I think pretty simple to move away from, since it's just fully compatible Postgres or Mysql. We even use a local postgres for development purposes against an Aurora solution.

Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tests passing should be a gate to merge into main. Tests can also be run in parallel.

Two green changes merged to a green main can produce a red main. This is not a commonly known fact. Just to take an example of GitHub, this check is disabled by default: > Require branches to be up to date before merging > Whether pull requests targeting a matching branch must be tested with the latest code.

> Two green changes merged to a green main can produce a red main.

I'm sure this happens occasionally, but I've never experienced it, and it seems to be rare enough that it's not that big of a concern. Especially since it'll be easily remedied by either just fixing the error or just reverting one or both of the changes.

Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs

#210

My word. I'm sort of gob smacked this article exists. I know there are nuances in the article, but my first impression was it's saying "we went back to basics and stopped using needless expensive AWS stuff that caused us to completely over architect our application and the results were much better". Which is good lesson, and a good story, but there's a kind of irony it's come from an internal Amazon team. As another…

Archived: https://archive.is/LFtNg http://web.archive.org/web/20230504060528/https://www.primev...

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