I really don't see any point why this post has been upvoted to this position. This someone got some discount because of being in some MS sponsored program and has no clue on how safe or unsafe his architecture is and has absurd rational on pricing. Good for him if he is happy to build with his MS gifts. Only if I could down vote this post and down rank it to absurdity.
My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why
41–50 of 209 posts
Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why
#42The guy behind PlentyOfFish (the dating site) has written similar things in the past. Various links and tech info: http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture It seems a lot of MS stuff, used properly, scale well and easily , making it particularly suitable for single founders or small teams where they don't want to devote a lot of time to ops (while still keeping it in-house). Becoming a member of their "Bi…
Don't forget StackOverflow: http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/8/5/stack-overflow-arch... - apart from the somewhat unbelievable PlentyOffish project, it's the only prestige project based on MS software most people will recall. In their 2011 update, they claimed to be using "a lot more Linux machines", because apparently it's fun to develop using Microsoft technology, but for some infrastructure components (proxying, Nagios...), there's no way to beat Linux even if you're a MS fanboy. ;-)
Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why
#43All our stuff runs on one (1) server This has nothing to do with MS, but why would you set up such an architecture? If one of the apps hits a memory leak (their HeatTest project did), than all of your other critical services/apps are interrupted. That costs us about $200 a month. By the way, that's Amazon What Amazon configuration gets you 8GB or RAM for $200/month?? Am I missing something? Database servers for all o…
$200 is a m.large instance (7.5.GB) plus the "provisioned i/o" charges (EBS volume). MS SQL is free since we're in BizSpark.
> "[insert technology here] is free since we're in BizSpark."
For how much longer? And then what?
Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's also a cap of 3 years, even if you haven't hit $1m revenue yet: http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/faqs.aspx#16
Fortunately, they reinvent the program every few years. So in reality you can be in EmpowerISV for 3 years, then BizSpark for 3 years, then [thing that replaces bizspark in 2/2014] for 3 years, etc. I've personally been in Microsoft's "let's give developers everything for basically free" programs since 2006, and am not worried that I'll suddenly face a crippling bill down the line. Shafting little startups for a lous…
What? You're basing your business continuity on a corporation creating a special 'free pass' for you every 3 years explicitly? Because they've done it once before? This seems like a terrible idea. Godspeed man, godspeed.
Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's also a cap of 3 years, even if you haven't hit $1m revenue yet: http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/faqs.aspx#16
Fortunately, they reinvent the program every few years. So in reality you can be in EmpowerISV for 3 years, then BizSpark for 3 years, then [thing that replaces bizspark in 2/2014] for 3 years, etc. I've personally been in Microsoft's "let's give developers everything for basically free" programs since 2006, and am not worried that I'll suddenly face a crippling bill down the line. Shafting little startups for a lous…
That sounds like relying on the kindness of strangers to me.
Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why
#46Wouldn't you be doing something horribly wrong if you couldn't serve 70k requests a day? It's actually less than 1 a second: 70000 / (60 * 60 * 24) = .81 I think this article is more about distributed systems being costly (yes) and perhaps overly complicated for the types of applications most people build. I agree. However, you could easily do the same with Linux.
you can serve 70k/requests day on a 386 from 1989.
Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why
#47You're bragging that your SaaS app, which serves hundreds of paying customers, runs on a single EC2 instance? lol
Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why
#48How much of this is old-school admin practices vs. the new "cloud" philosophy of spinning up lots of boxes that you don't care about? I don't see a Microsoft vs. Open-source argument for alot of this stuff. Many of the devs I see working with "cool kids" tools don't know anything about operating IT environments, yet they are playing admin. They're spinning up dozens of single-purpose VMs, sometimes to perform trivial…
This--and by "this" I mean cultural or philosophical differences--is what I feel is ultimately behind the stark performance gulf described in the OP's article.
I love Microsoft's technologies. I use Windows on my development environment (even though I don't do Windows development; I know, I am crazy). I own a Surface and a Nokia Lumia phone. Nevertheless, I also know that there's nothing absolutely fast about Microsoft's web stack [1].
I suspect what is at play here, instead, is one side being efficient with resources and the other being reckless.
My opinion is that some platforms and frameworks come bundled with a set of philosophical characteristics that most practitioners adopt. Some popular open source web frameworks include a poster of Knuth's famous quote about premature optimization and adopters consider that quote to mean more than it does, thereby expressly avoiding spending time thinking about performance because doing so might lead to time spent on optimizing code and that is evil.
Further, in our efforts to capture production-grade deployment instructions for many open source frameworks, we were left wanting, often having to turn to community opinion rather than specific instructions. Many frameworks' communities were Balkanized, leading to uncertainty about the best performing production-grade configuration.
It's not surprising when systems get built and deployed without any performance benchmarking, let alone tuning. I have no idea what "Charm" was or if it suffered from this sort of thing, but I've seen the described situation before and suspect it's fairly common.
Meanwhile, although I've not been a Windows developer, I suspect their culture comes bundled with a modest helping of being mindful of CPU and disk resources and preparation for production deployments. Microsoft is too friendly with corporate IT to leave production deployments a guessing game.
Finally, perhaps the OP in particular is just especially careful about performance, perhaps without even consciously making it a priority. Certainly none of us think it should be especially difficult for an m1.large server to process hundreds of thousands of dynamic web requests per day. It's more instructive to me, frankly, that we have come to think that is noteworthy.
Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why
#49From your marketing:
> Small enough to be personal. Large enough to be stable.
What happens when your one server goes offline?
Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why
#50I don't want to bash microsoft or anything. But 2.5 daily visitors and 1.5k new tickets daily can probably be served by nginx, a raspberry pi and a potato.
500px hosted 10x that on a Mac mini with a USB hard drive when they were starting out.
thats a really bold decision for a photo hosting site. has anyone coined the term "minimum viable hardware" yet?