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0 pointspclmulqdq3y ago0 comments

It sounds like you made a good decision, and yes, it sounds like your entire market (particularly the parts around exam hosting) is exceptionally bursty. I worked with some folks at a university on some of their IT systems, and they hit huge traffic spikes (literally 1000x their base load) around course registration and final exams. Their solution was to put 100 gbps NICs on their Oracle server...

I don't know how big your peak was compared to your average load, but if it was anything like that, serverless was a great call. Buying enough hardware for the bar exam and idling it 99.5% of the time sounds incredibly wasteful. However, this is an exceptionally bursty workload.

Most services do not have this level of traffic variability in such a way that a CDN can't handle it for you. 10x peak to trough variability (after your CDN) is fairly common, but still considered bursty, and in that case, AWS serverless still doesn't look great compared to DO droplets. Many services have daily or weekly cycles (without events like the bar exam), and run analytics workloads in their off hours.

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pwinnski3y ago

My suggestion to you, then, is this: instead of making blanket statements and allowing for a teeny-tiny exception for edge case, try to remember that the market is FULL of those edge cases. Almost the entire education market, billions of dollars of revenue, fits into what you described as "exceptionally bursty" and didn't even include in your first blanket dismissal. I suspect education isn't the only market that surprises you with its burstiness.

We frequently see links at HN that fall over and die after they're linked. On the one hand, that's usually because they've misconfigured a personal blog and lack caching. On the other hand, some services just weren't ready for HN traffic and failed to scale up. Which.... they wouldn't, were they running on a cloud provider like AWS.

It's possible for any service to be surprisingly bursty, but I suspect more than you think are bursty on a regular basis.

P.S. DO Droplets are Digital Ocean's response to AWS Lambda, and are still "cloud."

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0 pointspclmulqdq3y ago0 comments

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pwinnski3y ago

It's possible for any service to be surprisingly bursty, but I suspect more than you think are bursty on a regular basis.

P.S. DO Droplets are Digital Ocean's response to AWS Lambda, and are still "cloud."

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse