

Ask HN: Max no. of EC2 instances used by a single web app? - jm3

Including DB &#38; API machines, our web app occupies 18 heavily utilized Amazon EC2 instances under a  traffic load of ~7k RPM. "Conventional wisdom" says that we're mis-using EC2 by keeping so many virtual instances running but I prefer hard data to "conventional wisdom".<p>Curious to hear from the HN community: what’s the most long-running EC2 instances you've seen in a successful web app?
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kehunt
Some other data points:

* Animoto was running several thousands of machines in 2008 (<http://bit.ly/EDLtt>)

* Litmus runs 400 servers (<http://bit.ly/d7Hc7y>)

* 99Designs runs entirely on EC2 (<http://bit.ly/aotKgg>)

I've personally had long-running EC2 instances with uptimes in _years_. You
could do it cheaper in terms of hardware, but at the cost of wasting time at
the colo while you could be building cool shit.

~~~
nethergoat
Good start - I wasn't aware of the Litmus environment. The Animoto example is
great, I love telling that story to people just starting to look into cloud
computing.

To add to the large-environment roll call, here are the persistent server
counts of some 100% cloud-hosted companies:

\- Bizo: 100+ instances (I work here)

\- Reddit: 100(?) instances ("256 Virtual CPUs"
<http://us.pycon.org/2010/conference/schedule/event/148/>) - HNer jedberg runs
this

\- ShareThis: 250 instances (I worked here)

Longest-running instance I've had is at two years and still going strong.

~~~
grep
Is Reddit profitable?

~~~
jedberg
We don't discuss that, but Conde isn't a charity. They wouldn't keep us around
if it wasn't worthwhile.

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teej
Zynga runs over 12,000 EC2 nodes total. A single app like FarmVille, which
runs entirely on EC2, will be a few thousand. It's safe to guess we're
Amazon's biggest customer.

~~~
jedberg
You're not their biggest customer, but you're up there. :)

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imp
I've got two running now. A large for the webserver and a medium high CPU for
the database. Roughly a couple hundred reqests per second.

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jm3
I’ll go first: we (140 Proof) actually have 20 instances, not 18. How many
instances do other people’s apps use?

