Brent Sordyl's blog

How Amazon saved Zynga’s butt—and why Zynga built a cloud of its own | Ars Technica

May 25, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

For all Amazon’s scalability, the offerings can be a bit rigid. For example, you can rent an Amazon instance with a certain amount of storage and compute power, but adding a few gigabytes of memory or another processor might require buying a whole separate instance, which may have more resources than you really need.

“You can’t go to the public cloud and say I want another 64GB of memory here. They look at you and say ‘buy another instance of this type,’” Leinwand said.

Leinwand said the Amazon instance model leads to over-subscription, meaning you end up buying more storage than necessary. Internally, Zynga uses direct-attached storage striped across multiple servers, providing a big I/O performance boost and more efficient utilization, he said.

(Full Story: How Amazon saved Zynga’s butt—and why Zynga built a cloud of its own | Ars Technica)

aws, cloudcomputing, ec2

aws, cloudcomputing, ec2, privatecloud

What Powers Instagram: Hundreds of Instances, Dozens of Technologies

May 14, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

Most of our data (users, photo metadata, tags, etc) lives in PostgreSQL; we’ve previously written about how we shard across our different Postgres instances. Our main shard cluster involves 12 Quadruple Extra-Large memory instances (and twelve replicas in a different zone.)

We’ve found that Amazon’s network disk system (EBS) doesn’t support enough disk seeks per second, so having all of our working set in memory is extremely important. To get reasonable IO performance, we set up our EBS drives in a software RAID using mdadm.

(Full Story: What Powers Instagram: Hundreds of Instances, Dozens of Technologies)

architecture, aws

Global Netflix Technology Platform

May 1, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

A Large Scale Java oriented PaaS running on AWS

(Full Story: Global Netflix Technology Platform)

aws, paas

aws, netflix, paas

Amazon AWS Simple Workflow Service

February 22, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

Often an application consists of several different tasks to be performed in particular sequence driven by a set of dynamic conditions. Amazon SWF makes it very easy for developers to architect and implement these tasks, run them in the cloud or on premise and coordinate their flow. Amazon SWF manages the execution flow such that the tasks are load balanced across the registered workers, that inter-task dependencies are respected, that concurrency is handled appropriately and that child workflows are executed.

(Full Story: Amazon AWS Simple Workflow Service)

aws, workflow

aws, iaas, pass, workflow

Red Hat storage appliance for Amazon Web Services

February 10, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

Red Hat is releasing its own virtual storage appliance for Amazon Web Services for shifting enterprise datacenter files to the cloud. Built upon built on former Gluster technology acquired by Red Hat in 2011

(Full Story: Red Hat storage appliance for Amazon Web Services)

aws

aws, gluster, hat, red

Creating Web Services by Working Backwards at Amazon.com

November 26, 2011 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

The product definition process works backwards in the following way: we start by writing the documents we’ll need at launch (the press release and the faq) and then work towards documents that are closer to the implementation.

(Full Story: Creating Web Services by Working Backwards at Amazon.com)

amazon, aws, web-services

amazon, aws, desig, web-services

Amazon Web Services Toolkit for Eclipse – Version 2.0

August 17, 2011 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

The new features include a new AWS Explorer, support for multiple AWS accounts and identities, new editors for Amazon S3, Amazon SNS, and Amazon SQS, a new SimpleDB query editor, remote debugging for Elastic Beanstalk environments, and support for creating connections to databases hosted on Amazon RDS.

(Full Story: Amazon Web Services Toolkit for Eclipse – Version 2.0)

aws, eclipse