Why We Moved Off The Cloud • Hacker News Board

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#151

Post by noodle » Mon, Oct 31, 2011, 5:34 PM UTC

crag wrote: post #143

noodle wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if it was purely about price, then these people would've purchased these options regardless of the shortcomings if they had known about them beforehand. and if this is the case, they went in with eyes wide open and the cloud is right for them.

I doubt that. Trust when I tell you this, the carriers (and I'm including Comcast) sales people do not tell the customer the downsides and limitations. If you don't believe me. Try it. Call the business sales units of the carreirs. Now I believe in buyer beware. But that's the problem... most small business are suffering cash flow problems. When something cheaper comes along there is no "buyer beware". They think abo…

> It's just mind-blogging to me how many business owners are so ignorant about the tech that runs their business.

in my mind, this is the very definition of "uninformed choice". you don't have to be uninformed on purpose, you could also be kept in the dark intentionally by salespeople. you're still making a choice based on an incomplete picture.

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#152

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 31, 2011, 5:34 PM UTC

crag wrote: post #143

noodle wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if it was purely about price, then these people would've purchased these options regardless of the shortcomings if they had known about them beforehand. and if this is the case, they went in with eyes wide open and the cloud is right for them.

I doubt that. Trust when I tell you this, the carriers (and I'm including Comcast) sales people do not tell the customer the downsides and limitations. If you don't believe me. Try it. Call the business sales units of the carreirs. Now I believe in buyer beware. But that's the problem... most small business are suffering cash flow problems. When something cheaper comes along there is no "buyer beware". They think abo…

[deleted]

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#153

Post by cr4zy » Thu, Nov 03, 2011, 3:07 AM UTC

proofpeer wrote: post #149

cr4zy wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GAE definitely does not deliver more consistent performance. I've done a ton of performance tweaking on GAE as of late and my bottlenecks are now reduced to random points in the code between RPC's where my Python thread is obviously locked out of the CPU it was running on. I should say that the variation this leads to is at max around two seconds. I believe this is due to App Engine doing some dynamic grouping of slo…

That's interesting. Do you think you get better performance by using Java instead of Python? I heard bad things about Python and the GIL.

If you enable multi-threading for Java, yes. Although they are releasing multithreading with Python 2.7 in 5 days. This statement in their optimization article for the new rules is also interesting:

Muli-threading for Python will not be available until the launch of Python 2.7, which is on our roadmap. In Python 2.7, multithreaded instances can handle more requests at a time and do not have to idly consume Instance Hour quota while waiting for blocking API requests to return. Since Python does not currently support the ability to serve more than one request at a time per instance, and to allow all developers to adjust to concurrent requests, we will be providing a 50% discount on frontend Instance Hours until November 20, 2011. The Python 2.7 is currently in the Trusted Tester phase.

I've also noticed my app's speed pick up dramatically in the past few days. Perhaps because people are leaving before the new billing takes effect.

I don't mind the GIL much because I can just make a request to get a new thread going. :)

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#154

Post by asharp » Thu, Nov 03, 2011, 10:44 AM UTC

rachelbythebay wrote: post #145

asharp wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just need to do rolling deployments to make simple things like that go away. Roll out a deployment to N machines (like say 10), run self checks (you have those, right?), if everything passes give them standard load. Over the next K period of time, periodically check up on them. After that, roll over to N*2 or N^2 nodes, continue until you have rolled out to your entire cluster.

Some overly-confident human went "oh, this can't be bad" and force-approved it. This really happened. Multiple times. And they have rolling deployments. Their response? More administrative measures.

Sigh. Some things never change.