The reason we picked Scalr was because we cannot predict how far we will have to scale and we wanted something that would attempt to adapt for us. However, this still requires a lot more thinking about the architecture than I anticipated. I'm now at the point where I need to make a decision about which way to go with my data storage and I was hoping that other Scalr users might have some experience that they would like to share.
When we first started building our app we only had a few data objects to store for each user and we thought to use Rails to do this, but testing showed that this did not scale very well and there were a few problems with the system that I wanted to avoid. After analysis I determined that the app state could be expressed as a big JSON string and that most users would only have one or two saved states. As I thought about how to elimiate complexity it seemed that I could create some app servers to handle read and write REST calls and store the states for each user on disk somewhere. I can SQS if my servers start to bog down and I am waiting for more instances to appear to handle the work. Well and good, this runs a hell of lot faster than Rails, and the complexity of the code is not very great. But now I am faced with answering a question in order to decide which way to go. I can store my state strings in S3 and make the requests for state by a user be a redirected call to S3, or I can store the states in EBS and hope that the single instance can handle the load (and use a sharding strategy if needed). The thing I like about S3 is that I can just let the farm grow and shrink as needed since the storage is not limited to one instance, but I am worried about the access time. It seems that EBS would be faster, but my gut tells me that I'll have to be sharding soon and that I will have to intervene on that a lot. Also, the cost seems to favor S3 for my app since my state strings are only a couple of K, and S3 charges per G not per number of accesses. Does anyone have any experience with this kind of issue and would mind sharing their experience? Thanks, --fran --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "scalr-discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/scalr-discuss?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
