

The NoSQL explosion comes down to the cost of electicity - KentBeck
http://www.threeriversinstitute.org/blog/?p=450

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jrockway
Who buys $50,000 databases to run a website? Install Postgres and be done with
it. It's free, and has more features than many of the big databases.

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defen
You should keep reading, the $50,000 database is the first thing to go.

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jrockway
But this has nothing to do with "NoSQL", it's "No$50,00Software".

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owyn
"(EC2 is basically a really complicated way of charging for electricity.)"

That's the takeaway. I do agree with this basic premise though. That said,
it's not just charging for electricity, but electricity + profit for them. I
do think it's possible to run your own operations cheaper than outsourcing. I
think a lot of pure "cloud" solutions are just smoke on top of some jacked up
pricing. A lot of people are billing by weird bandwith+server+cpu+disk metrics
that are hard to evaluate. If it's hard to figure out, your probably getting
worked. Unless they're really adding something useful at an operational level,
do it yourself. Hardware is relatively cheap. Guys who can build and configure
hardware are reasonably available. Having total control over all that gives
you some flexibility and that's where you add your "special sauce".

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InclinedPlane
In my opinion that's a silly statement. You might as well say that a
restaurant is a really complicated way of charging for sunlight and water. (Or
if you want to go farther, a complicated way of charging for the CP violation
in the laws of physics which caused a slight excess of matter over anti-matter
during the big bang.) Reductionism to that level is unhelpful.

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projectileboy
Upvoted for a well-presented opinion, although I disagree. While the author's
reductionism may seem extreme, I think it's legit for his argument, which is
that electricity becomes the dominant cost over time, and that realizing that
fundamentally shifts how we think about the economics of hosting an app.

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Andys
The next step is hardware-based key-value stores. Generic Wintel PC servers
waste an incredible amount of power if all you need is a RAM-based key value
store connected to the network. Contact me with funding proposal if interested
.. :-)

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jrockway
_The next step is hardware-based key-value stores._

I believe this is called the TLB.

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antirez
A very good point. This is why I don't trust people telling me "fast is not
important, scalable is". Actually they are going to be _both_ very important,
as you want to scale using the minimum CPU cycles required.

