
Amazon deploys every 11.6 seconds - DanielRibeiro
http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/60/Velocity%20Culture%20Presentation.pdf
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bryanh
The talk on YouTube: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxk8b9rSKOo>

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Loic
I heavily recommend to watch the talk, 15 minutes packed with insights for the
sysops. Thank you for posting the link!

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awj
The same panel also has stats like "max number of hosts simultaneously
receiving a deployment (3000)". Depending on how you run the numbers those
3000 hosts could all take nine hours to receive a single deployment and
average out to 11.6 deploys / second / host.

Unless their systems are _heavily_ modularized, I have a bit of a hard time
believing that something new at Amazon goes live every 11.6 seconds. Maybe I'm
wrong, but I'd love to have a better grasp on the context involved here.

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jonjenk
Wow. Look at me on the front page of Hacker News!

Our systems are extremely modular. We've previously disclosed that in excess
of a hundred discrete services may be called to generate a single page on our
web site. You can find more info about that at the following link.

<http://highscalability.com/amazon-architecture>

When we refer to a deployment at Amazon it means a single code push to one or
more servers. For example, if you deploy a new piece of code to a thousand
hosts that counts as one deployment. In other words a distinct update is
pushed every 11.6 seconds.

Hopefully that makes sense.

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awj
Yeah, it does, and thanks for taking the time to point me at something a
little meatier than slides.

I guess it's just hard to imagine that kind of situation when I'm on a two man
web dev team that pushes out into the testing server 10-20 times a day and to
production once a week, if that.

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mcclung
Even though amazon.com is all on EC2 and capacity is demand driven, someone is
still buying servers and has some capacity overhead, right? They've just
shifted the spend from the amazon.com business unit to the AWS business unit
(assuming that's how it's set up)?

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onedognight
You can flatten the demand easily with EC2 by having the cost vary dynamically
based on overall load. So (using his example) during the end of November
Amazon themselves would want more servers and so the cost could go up
slightly. A drug company doing discovery might decide then not to run their
computations and to wait until the price drops back down. Likewise with
someone cracking passwords, or mining bitcoins.

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singlow
They have consistent pricing year-round for their on-demand and reserve
instances. The spot-instances are priced dynamically by auction and the supply
of them would be reduced when Amazon is using more instances itself. The price
of the spot instances will never exceed that of the on-demand rate, since no-
one would bid greater than a fixed rate for the same service. At the peak
usage, spot instances reach the same price as the on-demand rate.

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byoung2
_The price of the spot instances will never exceed that of the on-demand rate,
since no-one would bid greater than a fixed rate for the same service_

Checking the price history in the AWS console reveals that the prices for spot
instances occasionally exceed the on-demand rate. In particular t1.micro
instances reached $0.05/hr (vs the on-demand $0.02/hr). One possible
explanation is that spot instances are more valuable because you can run more
of them at a time than on-demand instances (100 total vs 20 total) without
having to get an exemption for your use case. Another possible explanation is
that people bid higher amounts to guarantee that their instances will run
uninterrupted, knowing that even if the price briefly exceeds the on-demand
price, the average should still be lower overall.

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andrewguenther
Is there a recording of the talk associated with this?

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r0dica
per the first comment: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxk8b9rSKOo> :)

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jonjenk
Here are two other great talks by one of my friends at Amazon.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UL2WDcNu_3A>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coNDCIMH8bk>

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chrismealy
Bad choice with the Toyota F1. Should have gone with a McLaren or a Ferrari.

