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Using AWS and Bit.ly to Eliminate Server State

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Re: Using AWS and Bit.ly to Eliminate Server State

#3

Post by redslazer »

milkshakes wrote: post #2

Combining these four elements has allowed me to upload and serve images from the billr.me domain without maintaining a database. I’m hosting on https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ for pennies per month and never need to do any server maintenance.

I dont think he is counting the cost of hosting on S3. :)

Re: Using AWS and Bit.ly to Eliminate Server State

#5

Post by spoletto »

redslazer wrote: post #3
milkshakes wrote: post #2

Combining these four elements has allowed me to upload and serve images from the billr.me domain without maintaining a database. I’m hosting on https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ for pennies per month and never need to do any server maintenance.

I dont think he is counting the cost of hosting on S3. :)

S3 is pretty cheap as well. $0.125 per GB of storage. Considering the images are ~80KB on average, S3 hosting is also just pennies per month. :)

Re: Using AWS and Bit.ly to Eliminate Server State

#6

Post by j_s »

I don't understand why bit.ly is involved at all... basically just to generate a unique short key?

If you implemented your own shout url generation you could just name the image with the short url and stop giving bit.ly that kind of insight into your operation.

Nice way to briefly hit the front page of Hacker News though, and the app looks nice!

Re: Using AWS and Bit.ly to Eliminate Server State

#7

Post by FaceKicker »

It seems like it might be simpler both for the dev and the user to just send an SMS with a neatly-formatted text version of the bill rather than a link to a screenshot of the bill. If it's just a couple amounts, tax, tip, and total, that seems like it would easily fit in 140 characters. The app design looks pretty nice though.

Edit: I guess maybe the advantage of this design is that you can easily send the bill for everyone at the table to everyone (probably wouldn't fit into 140 chars), which eliminates the need for the user to individually choose which contact corresponds to which column of the bill.

Re: Using AWS and Bit.ly to Eliminate Server State

#8

Post by spoletto »

FaceKicker wrote: post #7

It seems like it might be simpler both for the dev and the user to just send an SMS with a neatly-formatted text version of the bill rather than a link to a screenshot of the bill. If it's just a couple amounts, tax, tip, and total, that seems like it would easily fit in 140 characters. The app design looks pretty nice though. Edit: I guess maybe the advantage of this design is that you can easily send the bill for e…

The images that are being sent contain the amounts, tax, subtotal, tip and total for up to 16 individual people. Here's an example: http://billr.me/J7W5uY

Re: Using AWS and Bit.ly to Eliminate Server State

#9

Post by spoletto »

j_s wrote: post #6

I don't understand why bit.ly is involved at all... basically just to generate a unique short key? If you implemented your own shout url generation you could just name the image with the short url and stop giving bit.ly that kind of insight into your operation. Nice way to briefly hit the front page of Hacker News though, and the app looks nice!

I'm basically using Bit.ly as a key-value store and short URL generator. The Billr server doesn't maintain a database.
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