Comments on: CloudCamp London: the inauguration

By: Adil Mohammed’s “Startups In The Cloud” | Cloudyclothes

Adil Mohammed’s “Startups In The Cloud” | Cloudyclothes — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 23:35:34 +0000

[...] [via James Governor’s Monkchips] [...]

By: Zen 2.0 » Blog Archive » Adil Mohammed’s “Startups In The Cloud”

Sat, 02 May 2009 22:04:18 +0000

[...] [via James Governor’s Monkchips] [...]

By: Who owns the keys to the clouds?

Who owns the keys to the clouds? — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 01:05:41 +0000

[...] a enterprise level point of view what happens if for whatever reason you want to leave the cloud. James Governor points to this problem when he quotes Alan Williamson in a [...]

By: Living in the Cloud - Computing | WOWNDADI

Living in the Cloud - Computing | WOWNDADI — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:53:52 +0000

[...] was actually James Governor’s Segway (founder of RedMonk – his write up of the event here: CloudCamp London: the inauguration). However, I didn’t manage to persuade James to part with it, but he did get me thinking [...]

By: jgovernor

jgovernor — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:18:11 +0000

hey John nice to see you, but really, did you read the comments to help with context? I clearly never said all the servers were just for handling new user registrations.

I think Matt does a great job of helping to clarify.

By: Botchagalupe

Botchagalupe — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:19:50 +0000

Wait. wait. wait… just a second here. According to my calculations that’s a new server for every 63 users. Cloud or on premises that’s not exactly an impressive scalability number. I guess I need to know more. It wasn't just processing of new user registrations. They added a Facebook application that allowed new users to create their first Animoto video. That's why they needed all those servers. Also it was 25k to 700k. Here is a podcast w/Brad Jefferson the CEO of Animoto if you want the details. Cloud Cafe Podcast - Animoto

By: Matt Passell

Matt Passell — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:04:48 +0000

Hi James, thanks for the reply. I was specifically responding to this paragraph: “… that’s a new server for every 63 users. Cloud or on premises that’s not exactly an impressive scalability number. I guess I need to know more.”

I was just meaning to say that it seems impressive that EC2 could handle the load gracefully (as far as I know), aside from whether Animoto is a well-designed or practical architecture. I guess we were talking about different things.

As a side note, it seems like all of the prominent examples of scaling on EC2 involve batch-oriented, asynchronous processes (for which the SQS/S3/EC2 combination seems well suited). It would be interesting to hear about a large scale interactive app running on EC2.

By: jgovernor

jgovernor — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:32:45 +0000

Right on Matt. As you say video rendering is an incredibly CPU intensive process.

I hope it didn’t appear that I was talking about the limitations of anything other than a specific architecture. Of course animoto is not representative of all web architectures.

By: Matt Passell

Matt Passell — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 02:53:40 +0000

The work that Animoto does on EC2 (taking images and music and dynamically producing video) must be extremely CPU intensive. According to something I saw, it takes around 5 to 10 minutes to generate a video, using up most of the capacity of a small instance during that period. So, I’m not sure if they have the revenues to cover the cost of them, but I can see how they could get up to that many instances. Since their usage pattern is pretty different, I wouldn’t use Animoto as a gauge of how many concurrent users an EC2 instance can handle for a typical website.