Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

forbes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 70 posts

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

#21

Post by tlawrence »

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…

The point here isn't necessarily about the actual elasticity of the instances themselves, but the load balancer in front of them. With ELBs, they can only handle so much traffic so quickly. You literally cannot just point a million requests per second at it, even if you have 200 instances supporting it, and handle them all right off the bat. The ELBs themselves scale with the load, and currently, that scaling is slow during spikes.

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

#23

Post by scoot »

bhauer wrote: post #20

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 t…

Couldn't agree more. As I (poorly) tried to point out in my earlier off-the-cuff comment, requests-per-second is a meaningless measure without the context of the size of those requests. The Forbes repost and the original google marketing article are both vague on details, and appear to conflate requests-per-second with throughput.

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

#24

Post by jsnell »

bhauer wrote: post #20

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 t…

The blog post says 1 byte responses excluding HTTP headers. Since it was a standard Apache configuration, the headers would probably be something like 200-300 bytes.

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

#25

Post by enneff »

yeukhon wrote: post #12

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 Eng…

App Engine is not just a place to run your code. It has a nice deployment system with the ability to flip between versions instantly. It provides a few great pieces of core infrastructure: the datastore, task queues, and memcache (there are many others, but those are the essentials). The SDK gives you a stand-alone development server for testing locally. If you want to build web apps (or a backend for mobile apps), App Engine is a great way to go.

Compute Engine is for all the other stuff that you can't run on App Engine.

Incidentally, the datastore is now available as a stand-alone service, Google Cloud Datastore: https://developers.google.com/datastore/ This should benefit Compute Engine users.

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

#26

Post by drakaal »

bgentry wrote: post #10
drakaal wrote: post #7

This is the reason that our site. http://plexisearch.com uses Google App Engine. Google has allowed us to run "Code" rather than worry about infrastructure. Because it is an "Engine" we don't have to configure much, and the autoscaling is fantastic. Google Edge Cache means we get Better than CDN performance on static assets. There are limitation to AppEngine, but because we can also leverage virtual servers we can cr…

AFAICT this article is talking strictly about Google Compute Engine and its GCLB load balancer product, not about App Engine.

How do you think App Engine works? AppEngine runs on the same hardware and the same process described as a how to is nearly identical to what is obfuscated and provided to AppEngine users via a GUI.

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

#27

Post by rbanffy »

yeukhon wrote: post #12

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 Eng…

The main difference, for me, is that with EC2 (and GCE), my team manages the servers. With App Engine, it's Google's Site Reliability Engineers who do it.

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

#28

Post by nl »

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…

Anything that can process 1MM req/sec gets upvotes from me.

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

Not sure what the point you think you are making is here, but the Eurovision site was tested to 50,000 req/sec[1]. 50000 * 20 = 1MM

[1] http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/how-scalr...

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

#30

Post by _delirium »

espeed wrote: post #19
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 h…

It's definitely finer-grained, but there's still a 10-minute minimum per instance: billing is only per-minute above 10 minutes. So if you run a massively parallel 2-minute Hadoop job, you pay num_instances x 10min. Admittedly that's still a win, since AWS would bill you for 6x as much instance time. But it's not a 30x differential as you might guess from the headline "hourly" vs. "per-minute" pricing.
Post reply on HN