

Scale Something: How Draw Something Rode Its Rocket Ship Of Growth - angersock
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/168799/Scale_Something_How_Draw_Something_rode_its_rocket_ship_of_growth.php

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stickfigure
Wow, I had forgotten what it's like to work in a world where I have to manage
this drudgery myself. This is exactly why I build on App Engine.

Before all the haters reach for the downvote button: I have apps that
routinely go from 2-3 requests/sec to bursts of 500+ requests/sec for hours at
a stretch and the only difference is that my bill is a few tens of dollars
higher than usual. And there's no reason it couldn't handle 100X that load as
long as I keep paying the bill.

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wmalik
You have a point, but App Engine has the following issues: \- lock-in
(migrating your apps to another platform will be extremely hard) \- Less
control over your backend

IMO these two issues are enough to keep most of the app developers away from
App Engine.

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stickfigure
This is foolishness. Your biggest risk is that your product will fail in the
marketplace, not that for mysterious-and-unnamed-reasons you will suddenly
have to migrate off the platform. As far as "control" goes - there is nothing
about appengine that prevents you from running specialized application code in
other parts of the cloud. But it's a pretty exotic need.

~~~
wmalik
I know a thing or two about App Engine too, and I disagree with you.

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chaostheory
"Things got really bad around 1 a.m. one night, which is when we realized the
main issue -- our cloud data store was throwing errors on 90 percent of our
requests. Shortly after, we received an email from our vendor telling us we
were "too hot" and causing issues, so they would have to start rate limiting
us."

Was this Amazon's S3?

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paulhauggis
This is a great article and I think what they've done is great. But, it
reminds me why I don't think I could work for a startup (unless it's my own).

Working these kinds of hours (unless I own a large share in the company) just
sounds insane to me.

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richardw
It wouldn't be indefinitely. And the rush of making something that was being
appreciated worldwide combined with the knowledge that this is your one shot,
might just get me up at night. It becomes a story you can tell your grandkids.

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paulhauggis
I suppose. But it's not my one shot. It's the company owner's. I would much
rather tell my grandkids about what it takes to be a successful business owner
and show them that it is possible to make it on your own.

I've been a part of a few multi-million dollar companies. My code made it
possible. But, if I wasn't there, someone else would have made it happen.

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nchuhoai
Amazing Insights!

I really wonder how many people are capable of making services scale in such a
short time frame and such massive pressure. I hope I can learn it one day

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kooshball
What if working these hours guarantees a great return on your shares of the
company?

I am curious to hear whether the engineers working at this knew at the time
that this game was going to be so valuable for the company.

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gfodor
Honestly at some point it becomes less about the money and more about the fact
that you are pissing of, uh, 30 million people simultaneously. It kind of puts
the fire under your ass to fix things.

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mzungu
I wonder about the cost of all this, does anyone know if they were using the
enterprise versions of Couchbase?

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kennywinker
The lesson I learned from reading that article is don't name your game "Draw
My Thing". Hilarious.

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Swizec
There is nothing like the rush of solving Good Problems (tm) in the middle of
the night with a lit firecracker down your pants.

However I doubt all these problems are _as_ unpredictable as the article makes
them out to be. There's a whole field of science devoted solely to modeling
large systems of interconnected stochastic processes and identifying
bottlenecks.

This science is so old a mandatory semester-long class was devoted to it in
2nd year of my comp sci undergrad.

I do wonder how many developers who aren't working on government-backed
systems actually use that science though ...

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moe
_There's a whole field of science devoted solely to modeling large systems of
interconnected stochastic processes and identifying bottlenecks._

These models need to be fed known inputs and parameters such as component
limits.

Neither can be specified in advance for your average, public-facing,
constantly changing webapp.

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codeka
Exactly. And when you're pumping out half a dozen titles, each with wildly
different performance charactistics and no idea which will bomb and which will
be a huge hit, it's not really worthwhile to be overly thorough with any
single title until the shit hits the fan...

However, I do think the case could be made that trying to roll your own
infrastructure in this kind of scenario is perhaps not the best use of your
time, when solutions to scalabilty problems already exist and are so well
tested.

(Edit: what I mean by that is, if you use something like App Engine, you
really don't need to be concerned with scalability all that much -- as long as
you're working sensibly and within the constraints of the platform)

