Mashable: “Day two for Instagram was an exciting one. Krieger called his dedicated server representative to inquire about getting a new machine — he was quoted a two day turnaround. Instagram, already fast-approaching 40,000 users, would need something much sooner to meet the weekend demand. “We needed to be on a platform where we could adjust in minutes, not days,†says Krieger.”
Amazon EC2 to the rescue! I hear story after story like this. With Amazon EC2, Rackspace, and Microsoft Azure I’m not sure why you’d want to deal with hosting your own mess. Let them do it for you.
5 replies on “Instagram, Scaling for Success”
For the flip side of this, look at Reddit. They’ve been having all kinds of problems with the Amazon EC2 infrastructure hosting their MySQL databases.
That’s one area where Microsoft has an advantage since we’re explicitly building SQL Azure to work in the Azure environment, while MySQL is not being built to work well in Amazon’s environment.
In general, though, Cloud computing with its ability to handle demand elastically is the future. No way around it.
Tommy,
Azure is something I’m looking forward to using. We’ve just started plugging AppFabric into something we’re working on here. It’s pretty darned amazing and super easy to setup in code.
I’m hoping to push us onto Azure for certain projects that come our way.
Let me know how it goes. The AppFabric guys are in the same building I’m in at work and our team (Entity Framework and Data Services/OData), like most at Microsoft, are making sure our stuff works well in the Azure environment.
Hey, thanks Tommy, I’ll do that.
cause compared to a dedicated hoster or your own servers, EC2, rackspace etc. is very, very, very unstable and much more expensive.