Joyent Weblog
ps pipe grep: episode 11 (Imagine)
By David Young 14 February 07 Comment [8]
Ben, Jason, and Dave talk about load balancing, quantum computers, Intel’s 80-core chip, Yahoo Pipes, Widgets and the harm they can do, and John Carmack.
I’m serving the podcast from my Bingo disk.
Here’s a direct link to the mp3.
Here’s a non-iTunes RSS feed.
This week’s music: John Lennon. I bought this in Starbucks.
This week’s highlighted product: nothing.
Call in number: 415-226-1066.
Multiple Team Membership Coming
By David Young 14 February 07 Comment [4]
We’ve got lots of improvements coming for our Joyent collaboration suite. One of most important is the ability to be a member of multiple teams at once. You can be part of your business, and part of your clients’ teams. Guest or full access. Nice.
ps pipe grep: episode 10 (Have mercy)
By David Young 12 February 07 Comment [14]
Ben, Jason, special guest Jeff (sftpdrive), and Dave talk about Accelerator speed, twitter.com implementation and what the service does and how it is different than dodgeball.com, virtualization platforms (with the introduction of Linux KVM, OpenVZ, Xen, VMWare, Solaris zones/containers, Parallels), and topics surrounding the launch of Microsoft Vista.
I’m serving the podcast from my Bingo disk.
Here’s a direct link to the mp3.
Here’s a non-iTunes RSS feed.
This week’s music: Jenny Lewis & The Watson Twins from the album Rabbit Fur Coat.
This week’s highlighted product: Fairfax Scoop. From the heart of Marin County, California. Just like Joyent.
Call in number: 415-226-1066.
A brief update with some numbers for hardware load-balanced mongrels
By Jason Hoffman 4 February 07 Comment [18]
Back in August, I posted about a good-sized evaluation I was going to start doing about the horizontal scaling of different proxy engines and load-balancers across lots of mongrels.
The final report is still being written up in a whitepaper format.
But in short, we’ve stayed with F5’s BIG-IPs for at least one additional reason beyond their ability to handled gigabits of traffic across many many backend servers, and that additional reason is the ability to see inside packets and write iRules. iRules that can scrub http-reponse outs for credit card numbers and replace them with a “NOT ALLOWED TEXT”; iRules that can direct API traffic, bot traffic and traffic from specific user-agents to different backend pools (so you can separate API traffic from what people are hitting in a web browser), and iRules that can send .gif, .jpeg, .png off to different backend pools. All without any code changes, and this is just touching on some of the capabilities.
And to give you a general performance example, we recently added another 48 mongrels on 6 Joyent Accelerators behind a single public IP address to a set of BIG-IPs that are already directing 100s of Mbps of traffic, and without even getting around to tuning yet or caring about the backend numbers and configuration, we’re able to do quick 1 second bursts (like below), and then 10 seconds, 100 seconds, 1000 seconds, and one hour running benchmarks and get numbers like these below:
$ httperf --hog --server adomainname.com --port 80 --num-conn 4000 --rate 4000 --timeout 5 --uri=/theuri httperf --hog --timeout=5 --client=0/1 --server=adomainname.com --port=80 --uri=/theuri --rate=4000 --send-buffer=4096 --recv-buffer=16384 --num-conns=4000 --num-calls=1Total: connections 4000 requests 4000 replies 4000 test-duration 1.023 s
Connection rate: 3908.6 conn/s (0.3 ms/conn, <=99 concurrent connections)
Connection time [ms]: min 2.0 avg 6.0 max 66.3 median 3.5 stddev 9.4
Connection time [ms]: connect 0.5
Connection length [replies/conn]: 1.000Request rate: 3908.6 req/s (0.3 ms/req)
Request size [B]: 85.0Reply rate [replies/s]: min 0.0 avg 0.0 max 0.0 stddev 0.0 (0 samples)
Reply time [ms]: response 4.8 transfer 0.7
Reply size [B]: header 216.0 content 7850.0 footer 0.0 (total 8066.0)
Reply status: 1xx=0 2xx=4000 3xx=0 4xx=0 5xx=0CPU time [s]: user 0.39 system 0.59 (user 38.5% system 58.0% total 96.5%)
Net I/O: 31112.6 KB/s (254.9*10^6 bps)
Yes that’s the sub page of a rails application doing almost 4000 requests/second. But it’s also a small page with a blip text and a couple of small small avatarish images.
The 10% "rule" for infrastructure costs
By Jason Hoffman 4 February 07 Comment [2]
I was reading GigaOM the other day, specifically Google’s 2006 Money Shot, $10 billion in revenues, and his quote from Google’s earning release caught my eye:
Other cost of revenues, which is comprised primarily of data center operational expenses, as well as credit card processing charges, increased to $307 million, or 10% of revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2006, compared to $223 million, or 8% of revenues, in the third quarter.
A common rule of thumb I tell people is to target their performance goals in application design and coding so that their infrastructure (not including people) is ≤10% of an application’s revenue.
Meaning if you’re making $1.2 million dollars a year off of an online application, then you should be in area of spending $120,000/year or $10,000/month on servers, storage and bandwidth.
And from the other way around, if you’re spending $10,000 a month on these same things, then you know where to push your revenue to.
This is of course a general rule of thumb, and really applies to applications (not say more fundamental hosting or infrastructure products), and applications that consume more bandwidth and storage then usual can push this up.
But it’s nice to see that Google is around there.
Jason Hoffman will be doing a tutorial at RailsConf 2007 in Portland
By Jason Hoffman 2 February 07 Comment [9]
I’ll be doing a half-day tutorial at RailsConf 2007 Thursday morning titled Scaling a Rails Application from the Bottom Up.
The abstract is:
Ruby On Rails is an opinionated framework for developing web applications and has a considerable amount of flexibility in the back end.
While the framework is quite successful in removing the need for developers to worry about many back-end specific details, this separation tends to make issues with deployment, scaling and financing appear at inopportune times.
The tutorial will cover the full range of considerations in detail: power, space, location, staffing, hardware, components, network, operating system(s), development, staging, the choices in web, database and application servers and, most importantly, the cost. The range of costs will be from bootstrap to efficient enterprise. The perspective is one that will interest everyone involved in the development, deployment and financing of Rails-based applications.
The Joyent guys will also be getting a big suite in a hotel by the Oregon Convention Center for a nice series of parties while we’re in town. Long live the fat boys!
Hopefully we’ll see many of you there.
ps pipe grep: episode 9 (All the time)
By David Young 31 January 07 Comment [13]
We’re back.
Ben, Jason and Dave talk about OpenSolaris Build 56, Intel and Sun kissing in a tree; RSS readers…Vienna or NetNewsWire and some predictions for 2007.
I’m serving the podcast from my Bingo disk.
Here’s a direct link to the mp3.
Here’s a non-iTunes RSS feed.
This week’s music: some of the soundtrack from arguably the worse James Bond film of all time: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. But the music is great.
This week’s highlighted product: Three Twins Ice Cream. From the heart of Marin County, California. Just like Joyent.
Call in number: 415-226-1066.
"...control buttons fixed in plastic..."
By David Young 19 January 07 Comment [20]
I am sure many of you know the origin of the quote. It’s from the introduction of Apple’s iPhone last week. Early into the introduction, Mr. Jobs said about the other smart phones on the market:
They all have these control buttons that are fixed in plastic and the same for every application. [5’28”, iPhone introduction]
I was thinking about this yesterday while squinting at my iPod Nano while on a bike ride.
No more iPods until they get rid of those control buttons fixed in plastic.
Joyent Core: Live
By David Young 11 January 07 Comment [23]
We’re a couple months late (billing systems…), but now Joyent customers get all our consumer applications for a simple, low price. We call it “Joyent Core”. $15/month (or $99/year) gets you:
Shared Hosting Account (from TextDrive)
Includes 5 websites, 5GiB of space, 5 databases, 15GiB bandwidth
On-line Backup and File-sharing (from Strongspace)
5 users, 5GiB of storage.
Collaboration Suite
Includes 5 users, 5GiB of storage and email, calendar, contacts, files, bookmarks with more applications and features to come.
We also have tiers at $50 and $100 month. You can see all the details here.
[Existing Joyent customers are being migrated to Joyent Core presently for no additional costs.]
Nordstrom's Line of Cash Registers
By David Young 4 January 07 Comment [10]
Nordstrom is a great chain of department stores in the USA. What began as a shoe store with enormous selection and fanatical service, expanded to provide a wide range of high-quality men’s, women’s, teen and kid’s clothing. I often gets calls from a salesperson at Nordstrom telling me about new stock that I may be interested in based on past buying behavior. Nordstrom has a no-questions return policy. They only sell shoes, clothes, cosmetics, decorative jewelry. Focus+selection+service. Perfect. No kitchen wares, no appliances, no furnishings, no distracting categories that confuse the focus of management with the inevitable repercussions to the bottom line and the stock price. The don’t have a line of cash registers.
I was thinking of Nordstrom when I read this prediction by John Battelle for 2007:
7. Amazon will continue to push beyond ecommerce into web services, the market will punish it for doing so, and by the end of the year Bezos will be forced to defend his investments as his stock takes a hit for those services’ failing to find traction. It’s not that I don’t believe in Jeff’s vision, it’s the track record with things like Alexa and the very real sense I have that the market for what Jeff’s selling is not yet fully baked.
Remember when Amazon just sold books (=shoes)? They had an enormous selection. I remember a radio ad back in the day about Amazon wanting to rent out the Superdome in New Orleans to store all those titles. They used to suggest titles based on past book-buying activity. The return policy was easy. All these things are still true. Heck, they may have learned all this (focus+selection+service) from Nordstrom, another Seattle, WA -based retailer, who doesn’t have a line of cash registers.
