Web 2.0 Companies NEED To Scale
Sometimes I read a blog post and it just makes me smile.
Today Jeremy Wright talks about the need for scaleability for Web 2.0 companies (he's specifically talking about an announcement from FeedLounge). He says:
Listen up. If your company relies on the web to stay alive, you’d damn well better be using at least some of the following “ladder to high availability”:
Backups, Redundant, Failover, Cluster, Distributed, Grid and finally Mesh
Each step up is a massive increase in cost, but it’s also a massive increase in uptime and such. I hate it when companies say they want 99.9% uptime (or even worse 5 9s of uptime) without thinking about what that’ll cost them.
Distributed/Grid computing should be the kind of thing that these companies are thinking about from the time they begin planning their architecture. They have to plan for success. They have to plan on hundreds of thousands or millions of users, right?
And I'll go a step further than Jeremy--the other thing Web2.0 companies shouldn't do is write that portion of their applications from scratch. I mean, no one in their right mind writes their own database to sit under web apps, right? You go get one--SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL , whatever is right for you--but it would be a complete waste of your time to sit down and write one from scratch.
So why do people try to do that with a distributed/grid system? Most do. It's too bad; it's a waste of their valuable time and money. And in all likelihood, they'll end up with a solution that isn't nearly as scalable as they think is.
I'll let Jeremy finish this one up for me:
If your business depends on your website being up, look at your code, look at your infrastructure and for your users sake figure out what you actually need and build the damn thing properly!
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