Scobleizer - Latest Comments in The serverless Internet company

Re: The serverless Internet company

PuReWebDev — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 19:43:52 -0000

No servers is rather impressive. I've been using Amazon's ec2 for some experimenting myself, and I've gotta say it's rather decent. I'm just curious about what the monthly bill to Amazon is for them if they don't bother to check if the meter is running, lol.

Re: The serverless Internet company

Denis — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 16:04:30 -0000

olitics are a mine field of comedy which will never run out. Those who want to go mining will always be assured. It is there when a country is peaceful and when a country is undergoing a crisis.

Re: The serverless Internet company

Steve — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 19:43:58 -0000

AppPad is another new service that let's you build "serverless" apps (i.e. HTML+Javascript data-driven simple apps).

http://apppad.com

Re: The serverless Internet company

yooronews — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 17:40:10 -0000

Don't see why all the hubba about Amazon. I have a website that generates around 5000G traffic each month, and I'm paying $150 for the server. I did the amazon math on the site, and it would cost at least double what I'm paying now.
And the traffic is way more expensive.

Re: The serverless Internet company

QAArtist — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 12:18:52 -0000

Atishae QAArtist is an Automated Testing Framework to provide functional, regression and load testing for web applications that uses AWS EC2 to scale up.

We would be soon provisioning via DevPay for customers to launch their test suites directly off Amazon.

(Testing Windows Apps still work off the desktop -- no EC2 there, yet!)

Visit us @ http://www.atishae.net or write to us @ qaartist@atishae.net

Re: The serverless Internet company

cbmeeks — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 22:51:44 -0000

The world definitely has changed. I've been with S3 for over a year and love it. I am hopefully going to roll out a new service early next year (08) that will put terabytes to S3.

Wish me luck!

http://cbmeeks.blogspot.com

Re: The serverless Internet company

Michael Carter — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 21:25:26 -0000

Serverlessness: a cool concept. How precisely do they do DNS though? Amazon servers and ip addresses are volatile... what if one goes down and they lose the ip address?

Re: The serverless Internet company

Kola — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 08:16:06 -0000

Interesting comments - for those making use of Amazons service any complaints on reliability/stability? Any downtime?

Re: The serverless Internet company

Kara-Hannah — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 00:09:44 -0000

In response to Bill Seitz:

You should come check out blogTV.com. There is plenty of archivesto watch plus the added benefit of constant live streaming shows in which you can interact with the hosts and other users.

Its a unique community and a hell of a lot of fun!

Check it out!

Re: The serverless Internet company

Ariane Lindblom — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 18:10:16 -0000

Comment re: data persistence on EC2/S3...

We (www.elastra.com) are providing a database offering (MySQL, EnterpriseDB & PostgreSQL) and file system to now allow persistent data and clustering on EC2.

Please check us out and provide feedback! From the problems I am reading about in earlier posts we are solving the database issues many folks are referencing. We are in beta testing right now.

Re: The serverless Internet company

BillSeitz — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 09:54:02 -0000

Maybe because Mogulus is focused on live/streaming video, they have less in the way of archives to generate views/lists on.

(For a long time the Yahoo directory was driven by static files rather than a db. On the other hand, to *search* that directory, rather than browse its hierarchy, would still require a persistent engine. On the other-other hand, maybe you could generate your index, store it on S3, etc....)

Some actual details (I googled but didn't find anything) on Mogulus' infrastructure would take this beyond smoke.

Re: The serverless Internet company

BillSeitz — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 09:41:57 -0000

I believe that SmugMug stores all their image files on S3.

But that doesn't mean
* their webservers run on EC2
* they don't need some sort of database to generate views from meta-data.

Clearly they're still running something
http://blogs.smugmug.com/do...

Re: The serverless Internet company

John McGrath — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 19:27:41 -0000

@Dean, I think one thing that raises Amazon above the level of the typical VPS provider is that many of their services have an API, and can be hit programatically. S3 can eliminate not just the db box, but the db itself: no MySQL, no Oracle. Just pipe your data to S3.

On http://wordie.org I'm using slicehost.com, fwiw. They don't offer an API, so I had to install and manage MySQL. But I don't have to deal with server maintenance, and I can add capacity easily and quickly.

I think Amazon has it right, though: eliminate the overhead not just of the hardware, but also the lower levels of the software stack.

Re: The serverless Internet company

Dean Collins — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 19:08:24 -0000

The question you don't ask however is "Why Amazon"?

There are a ton of other colo, server rental, virtual computing....etc etc providers out there - what is the magic sauce that Amazon EC2 and S3 hit on that is drawing all the flies to the honey?

Any thoughts?

Cheers,
Dean Collins
www.Cognation.net

Re: The serverless Internet company

Deepak — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 18:35:56 -0000

Bioscreencast is also moving to EC2/S3. We have a hosted server that we use for development/staging, but all screencasts will be served up from S3 and we have other plans as well, especially for EC2.

As people above have noted, not having inhouse servers is nothing new. It's the flexible capacity and utility aspects of Amazon, 3Tera, etc that are so cool and novel, at least for running businesses.

Re: The serverless Internet company

Darwin Widjaja — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 13:17:58 -0000

I just launched Tripntale and we're entirely using Amazon's EC2 and S3 for our backend. So yes, we don't have to manage any server and yet we have about 10000 pictures uploaded in the first month.

Re: The serverless Internet company

mrskeptical — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 00:39:50 -0000

It's a cool service, but is Amazon actually making a profit on EC2/S3?

Re: The serverless Internet company

barmijo — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 00:10:01 -0000

>>> "I always assumed that companies would have at least one server keeping things up, just in case Amazon went down"

IMHO if folks felt they had to keep extra hardware around this would be a showstopper to adoption of utility computing systems. At 3tera, we do have some users that keep back end systems off the grid, but it's most often because these systems run on an OS that isn't yet supported on the grid, like Windows. In those cases, though, the servers running those back end processes are also hosted in the same data center.

Re: The serverless Internet company

Adrian — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 10:38:55 -0000

Francine: Twitter uses Amazon services.

Re: The serverless Internet company

modestypress — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 10:12:39 -0000

"Nothing can go wrong, go wrong, go wro---"

"I'm sorry, Dave. I can't let you do that."

Re: The serverless Internet company

Keith Casey — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 08:53:06 -0000

We're doing the same thing for WhyGoSolo (whygosolo.com) except that we do have one fixed node for shared testing, etc. Production is on the grid. :)

Re: The serverless Internet company

gwhiz — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 02:07:21 -0000

Mr. Scoble - The Amazon Web Challenge will be revealing a LOT more really good "serverless" startups very soon. Looks like December timeframe a winner of the challenge will be picked and hoisted high.

I actually think AWS is doing a great job on PR and turning quite a few of us into dyed in the wool believers. It's how my bootstrapped startup will be powered.

Re: The serverless Internet company

Muse — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 23:27:14 -0000

This is a bit outdated. We (the community) have been renting, leasing, whatever you like to call it, servers for some time now. Co-lo facilities are, have been, changing to hosting facilities; give us some cash, and we take care of the server - hardware - et al., you just config it and run your software on it.

The difference here being that Amazon has been doing this on a large scale, and taken a bit more of a "utility" approach.

"These arent the droids we're looking for. Move along..."

Re: The serverless Internet company

Karim — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 19:19:34 -0000

> How did Microsoft screw this up so badly?

Au contraire. Google "Microsoft Astoria."

http://astoria.mslivelabs.c...

I don't know how much visibility it has outside of the developer community. Microsoft is not asleep on this one, even if they don't have a service on the same scale as Amazon's yet. I don't know if they will win, but they are not dropping the ball. They are busy trying to win the hearts and minds of devs, which is the old fashioned Microsoft way.

Likewise they are doing some very interesting things with virtualization, which will make hosting even more of a commodity than it already is. Want a fresh Windows 2008 box? Click, there it is. Want to add another processor and another 1 GB of RAM? Click, click, there it is.

I don't know if Microsoft will get into the business of renting the commodities (virtual servers, virtual storage) directly to companies, but they are certainly busy building stuff that will enable OTHERS to do so. I'm sure as far as Microsoft is concerned, it doesn't matter whether you rent virtual storage from me, or rent it from Microsoft -- as long as a SQL Server license is paid for by *somebody* :-)

Re: The serverless Internet company

Merkin — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 18:39:11 -0000

Web 3.0..

I know you did not just go there.