With Software, Small is the new Big

So you re-architected your application and ran it on different hardware, and it performed better. I wonder whether that's due to the re-architecting or due to the hardware, since generally AWS hardware is extremely expensive for what you get. It would be interesting to see how well the new architecture performs on beefy dedicated boxes for the same money as the AWS hardware, especially since you can get a beefy dedicated server for cheaper than a standard EC2 instance.

That sounds more like "with servers, small is the new big" to me. From the looks of it, it doesn't sound like the (custom) software itself got any smaller.

Though I like the idea of modularity, wouldn't having so many different services running at once in completely independent compartments make it much harder to monitor and manage the software as a whole? I feel like that's a whole lot of quirks to interact in the course of a given transaction.

You got 1/10th of the I/O performance, so you traded disk seeks for network latency?

Interesting, usually you see people move away from EC2 over time with growth

Modularization rediscovered.

Hmm, building apps to be service oriented instead of object oriented.... because the web is service oriented.<p>I've noticed a few times that some of the problems we run into with web apps are due to OO not architecting itself in an SOA friendly manner.<p>Why not have a bunch of little heroku apps? For most web apps that start out small this isn't as big of a deal and you can grow the sub apps that do?

<i>If you wrote software to take advantage of monster physical servers, it will almost certainly fail to run efficiently in the cloud.</i><p>I find this statement kind of incredible when the solution for the terrible I/O of EC2 is to spin up ranks and ranks of virtual machines, trying to make up the difference in aggregate. That is efficiency?<p>When I have a problem with I/O, I improve I/O: A gorgeous cluster of Nimble SANs with some supporting local Fusion IO cards. When I have a problem with memory or caching servers, I add memory or caching servers (just got a relatively low cost <i>dev</i> server with 192GB...just incredible). When I need more processing power, I add more processing power. Just added some Xeon E5s to the mix, and boy do they set new thresholds of power.<p>That's the world of controlling my own hardware.<p>This story is really one about restrictions forcing a more efficient platform. Yet you don't <i>need</i> restrictions to have an efficient platform, and the two are only loosely correlated. This is the story of the alcoholic cheering on prohibition without which they couldn't contain themselves.