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Google Shows How To Scale Apps From Zero To One Million RPS, For $10

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Re: Google Shows How To Scale Apps From Zero To One Million RPS, For $10

#11

Post by tehwebguy »

scoot wrote: post #5

The only reason I can see for this being this high on the front-page [18 points and only one comment(from a googler)] is the google employee block vote (apparently tech-savvy isn't a prerequisite in the google upvote marketing department): 1 million requests per second is 20 times greater than the throughput in last year’s Eurovision Song Contest, which served 125 million users in Europe No, r/s != Gb/s.* (Cue the do…

I don't know man, someone's codepen with some pretty CSS is pretty high on the front page with 10 pts and 0 comments.

Re: Google Shows How To Scale Apps From Zero To One Million RPS, For $10

#12

Post by yeukhon »

I am pretty excited and yet shocked to see what Compute Engine has evolved into. The original Compute Engine was about scaling (as cluster) in scientific experiment and yet this news makes me think Compute Engine is becoming the new App Engine but with full control of the VM (plus the amazing autoscaling feature). I always like to control my own VM because I can do much more with a VM than a sandbox (to me an App Engine is just a sandbox loaded with X framework and X database). I have always wanted to work on Compute Engine :(

This is an interesting marketing stragery. People who wish to launch a VM can choose CE and people who just want a sandbox quickly they can use App Engine? Though I am really skeptical about the future of App Engine if the CE became cheaper. I am sure if that happens, Google will do everything it can to migrate things over to CE. This is probably many years down the road...

I still think CE is really good for computations.

Re: Google Shows How To Scale Apps From Zero To One Million RPS, For $10

#13

Post by ancarda »

bgentry wrote: post #9
scoot wrote: post #5

The only reason I can see for this being this high on the front-page [18 points and only one comment(from a googler)] is the google employee block vote (apparently tech-savvy isn't a prerequisite in the google upvote marketing department): 1 million requests per second is 20 times greater than the throughput in last year’s Eurovision Song Contest, which served 125 million users in Europe No, r/s != Gb/s.* (Cue the do…

Have you worked extensively with ELBs? They need pre-warming in advance of significant traffic changes, they can't handle spikes well because they take many minutes to respond to changes in traffic volume, and they use an ever-changing set of IP addresses for your load balancer nodes. The GCE load balancer has none of these problems, which makes it a huge advantage over AWS and ELBs. Disclaimer: I'm an engineer at He…

>They need pre-warming in advance of significant traffic changes

Why?

Re: Google Shows How To Scale Apps From Zero To One Million RPS, For $10

#14

Post by [deleted] »

tehwebguy wrote: post #11
scoot wrote: post #5

The only reason I can see for this being this high on the front-page [18 points and only one comment(from a googler)] is the google employee block vote (apparently tech-savvy isn't a prerequisite in the google upvote marketing department): 1 million requests per second is 20 times greater than the throughput in last year’s Eurovision Song Contest, which served 125 million users in Europe No, r/s != Gb/s.* (Cue the do…

I don't know man, someone's codepen with some pretty CSS is pretty high on the front page with 10 pts and 0 comments.

[deleted]

Re: Google Shows How To Scale Apps From Zero To One Million RPS, For $10

#15

Post by danhoc01 »

$10 for a 10 minute test, okay. A month of 200 US-hosted n1-standard-1 machines would cost 200 * $.115 * 30 (days) * 24 (hours)... over $16,000. That doesn't include load-balancing, bandwidth, or any additional charges there may be. The price shouldn't be mentioned anywhere in the article.

Demand is elastic of course, and if you really want to scale in a cost-effective manner you also need to do auto-scaling. As far as I can tell (I have no direct experience with GAE), it's much easier on AWS. It would also be interesting to see if you can scale your pool of webservers from 1 -> 200 faster on AWS or GCE.

The article does quote @cloudpundit, who hits on the true point of the exercise: Relevance of GCE LB load test: With AWS ELB, if you expect a big spike load, must contact AWS support to have ELB pre-warmed to handle load. I would also guess that Amazon is working to improve ELB to behave similarly, especially now that Google's product has less restrictions than theirs.

Re: Google Shows How To Scale Apps From Zero To One Million RPS, For $10

#16

Post by bgentry »

ancarda wrote: post #13
bgentry wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you worked extensively with ELBs? They need pre-warming in advance of significant traffic changes, they can't handle spikes well because they take many minutes to respond to changes in traffic volume, and they use an ever-changing set of IP addresses for your load balancer nodes. The GCE load balancer has none of these problems, which makes it a huge advantage over AWS and ELBs. Disclaimer: I'm an engineer at He…

>They need pre-warming in advance of significant traffic changes Why?

Because they consist of a set of EC2 instances, the vertical and horizontal scale of which is determined automatically based on the average traffic profile of each node. Once the traffic has increased enough to warrant a scaling event, it takes minutes for new ELB nodes to come online and go into DNS rotation before they can start serving traffic.

Re: Google Shows How To Scale Apps From Zero To One Million RPS, For $10

#17

Post by mattmanser »

bgentry wrote: post #9
scoot wrote: post #5

The only reason I can see for this being this high on the front-page [18 points and only one comment(from a googler)] is the google employee block vote (apparently tech-savvy isn't a prerequisite in the google upvote marketing department): 1 million requests per second is 20 times greater than the throughput in last year’s Eurovision Song Contest, which served 125 million users in Europe No, r/s != Gb/s.* (Cue the do…

Have you worked extensively with ELBs? They need pre-warming in advance of significant traffic changes, they can't handle spikes well because they take many minutes to respond to changes in traffic volume, and they use an ever-changing set of IP addresses for your load balancer nodes. The GCE load balancer has none of these problems, which makes it a huge advantage over AWS and ELBs. Disclaimer: I'm an engineer at He…

Out of interest, what is a rough idea of the total requests per second on heroku for everything? All your nodes or whatever you call them? Dynamos?

Is 1,000,000 request per second a stupid, pointless number as no-one ever gets 1,000,000 requests per second or is this some sort of meaningful number?

Re: Google Shows How To Scale Apps From Zero To One Million RPS, For $10

#18

Post by bgentry »

mattmanser wrote: post #17
bgentry wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you worked extensively with ELBs? They need pre-warming in advance of significant traffic changes, they can't handle spikes well because they take many minutes to respond to changes in traffic volume, and they use an ever-changing set of IP addresses for your load balancer nodes. The GCE load balancer has none of these problems, which makes it a huge advantage over AWS and ELBs. Disclaimer: I'm an engineer at He…

Out of interest, what is a rough idea of the total requests per second on heroku for everything? All your nodes or whatever you call them? Dynamos? Is 1,000,000 request per second a stupid, pointless number as no-one ever gets 1,000,000 requests per second or is this some sort of meaningful number?

I can't release any of our traffic numbers, but I can tell you that 1M req/s is an enormous number. For some context, here's a post from Netflix from the end of 2011 where they state that their API received 20,000 req/s at peak: http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/12/making-netflix-api-more-...

Re: Google Shows How To Scale Apps From Zero To One Million RPS, For $10

#19

Post by espeed »

danhoc01 wrote: post #15

$10 for a 10 minute test, okay. A month of 200 US-hosted n1-standard-1 machines would cost 200 * $.115 * 30 (days) * 24 (hours)... over $16,000. That doesn't include load-balancing, bandwidth, or any additional charges there may be. The price shouldn't be mentioned anywhere in the article. Demand is elastic of course, and if you really want to scale in a cost-effective manner you also need to do auto-scaling. As far…

GCE instances are charged in 1 min increments (https://cloud.google.com/pricing/compute-engine), not 1 hour increments like AWS (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/).

1 min increment billing enables you to spin up massive Web clusters to handle spikes or Hadoop clusters so big that you can process the entire dataset it a few minutes, while paying less than you would for a smaller AWS cluster that's billed by the hour.

Re: Google Shows How To Scale Apps From Zero To One Million RPS, For $10

#20

Post by bhauer »

I only skimmed the gist with the instructions for reproducing the test [1], but in that skimming I could not figure out what the request and response were in this simulation. Were these responses 100 bytes, 1k, 10k, 100k? I guess small responses, but I'm not certain.

I know the goal of the test is to demonstrate how capacity can be scaled upward in very little time and with comparatively little effort. And for that this demonstration is impressive!

That said, the requests per second number is not especially impressive given that a modest single server can easily saturate gigabit Ethernet with 100-byte responses (and it's even easier to do so with larger responses) [2]. I am left wondering, does the $10 cost cover the cost of server instances and bandwidth? If so, that is a very good deal. The bandwidth charges for exceeding the capacity of a gigabit Ethernet connection (1M RPS with even the most trivial requests requires more than 1 gigabit) would be substantial with many hosting providers.

[1] https://gist.github.com/voellm/1370e09f7f394e3be724

[2] http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r7&hw=i7...

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