App Engine?

Wed Jul 14 19:44:26 MST 2010

For Web Applications on the Cloud CouchDB and MongolDB *are* replaying
RDBMS.

On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 7:16 PM, Trent Shipley <trent_shipley at yahoo.com>wrote:

> Do those massive, distributed, and fast Internet platforms give up
> flexibility?  A RDBMS is designed as a general solution for storing and
> querying structured data.  If the Internet solutions are general solutions
> why haven't they displaced the enterprise scale solutions?
>
>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Joseph Sinclair <plug-discussion at stcaz.net>
> *To:* Main PLUG discussion list <plug-discuss at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us>
> *Sent:* Wed, July 14, 2010 6:45:26 PM
> *Subject:* Re: App Engine?
>
> MySQL IS a single-server environment.  No single MySQL instance spans
> multiple servers.  Clustering doesn't make software distributed, it makes it
> clustered (which is COMPLETELY different).
> Cassandra is NOTHING like MySQL.  It actually is a distributed
> column-oriented datastore (and it's NOT an RDBMS).  Cassandra is not
> clustered either, it's *distributed*.
> Try this:
>   Cluster 50 MySQL instances; randomly pull power (without warning or
> shutdown) on 10.  Is the cluster still able to serve all rows?  Did you
> loose any data or transactions?
>   Run a 50-node Cassandra instance (single instance, 50 machines); randomly
> pull power (without warning or shutdown) on 10.  Is the instance still able
> to serve all rows?  Did you loose any data?
> That experiment will show you one of the MANY ways distributed systems are
> different from clustered (without having to run 2000 machines to see the
> difference).
>
> Facebook uses actual distributed software (things like Hadoop, Hive,
> Cassandra, etc...)  They don't run their site off of MySQL (or Oracle, for
> that matter).
> Digg uses distributed systems as well, because scaling to their load is
> "increasingly difficult with MySQL" (http://about.digg.com/node/564).
> There isn't a clustered solution possible that would handle their scale, in
> fact they haven't been using a cluster, in the traditional sense, for years.
>
> All of them use things like MySQL for smaller, internal-facing systems, but
> none of them use *any* RDBMS for a user-facing site.
> I can show you conclusively that MySQL (and any RDBMS) fails at large scale
> because the n^2 locking problem kills it.
> Clustering is fine for an Enterprise application.  It's death for an
> Internet application.
>
> Amazon runs amazingly fast, have you actually used Amazon.com (you do
> realize that their cloud offerings are the same infrastructure they use to
> run their own sites?).
> Google.com gets search results in <1 second every time.  Try doing that
> with MySQL or Oracle.  Neither is capable of even storing a small part of
> the index; their internal limits won't permit a table that big, much less an
> indexed table.
>
> If all you've ever built is enterprise apps with less than 100,000 users,
> you'll never understand why enterprise solutions don't scale to Internet
> numbers (100 million users or more).  5 years ago, I would have agreed with
> you; that was before I had to write software that could process more than
> 40,000,000 transactions per day and produce multidimensional analyses of all
> that data.
> There's a completely different world of scale between 100,000 users and 100
> million users, and solutions for the smaller scale are completely useless at
> the larger scale.
> There are lots of people who think dumping their LAMP site on EC2 will make
> it fast, they're wrong.
> You have to design for scale when you build the software.
>
> AppEngine, BTW, is also good for small low-volume applications, just
> because it can be MUCH cheaper to run a small app on AppEngine than to run a
> hosted server (particularly if you want to write in Java or Python rather
> than PHP).
>
> I've developed on Google's and Amazon's platforms.  I've also written (and
> am writing) the kind of distributed infrastructure those two use to enable
> their huge sites.  Not many systems require that kind of scale; for those
> that do there's no alternative to real lock-free/contention-free distributed
> systems.
>
> When was the last time your app generated <100ms response times doing
> multiple PKI operations on 4M-40M files while sustaining >2000
> requests/minute on <10 commodity servers with no special hardware?
>
> ==Joseph++
>
> Bryan O'Neal wrote:
> > Joseph they are not a single server environment. You cluster them! It
> > is like saying MySQL or Casandra are single server environments -
> > combine them all and that would be one hell of a server sites like
> > Facebook and Dig run off of ;)
> > As for Fast - try Google's or Amazon's offering - WOW That is some
> > speed! You'll start to feel like it's running on a cluster of iPhones!
> >
> > On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 9:05 PM, Joseph Sinclair
> > <plug-discussion at stcaz.net> wrote:
> >> Apache and Tomcat are not even close to distributed computing
> environments.
> >> They're single-server environments, and neither is even particularly
> fast in that role.
> >> They are both well known and well supported, however.
> >> If your application is simple enough to run on a single server (no
> matter how many users, as long as there aren't too many at one time), then
> that type of solution is fine (and a lot easier to program).
> >> If your application's processing gets more complex as more users log in
> (relatively few applications do this), then no number of instances of a
> single-server-model web-server will handle the load, and you'll have to
> accept harder programming in order to scale beyond a few hundred thousand
> users.
> >>
> >>
> >> Bryan O'Neal wrote:
> >>> Every time I run the analysis your better off writing for a
> >>> distributable open source app engine, like Apache / Tomcat. And
> >>> horizontally spanning as required on commodity hosts, like go daddy.
> >>>
> >>> On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 7:00 PM, Doc Media <doc_media at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> >>>> Anyone had experience (good or bad) with Google's App Engine? �A
> friend
> >>>> of mine was looking to start a project, and we were discussing the
> finer
> >>>> points of a regular hosting company versus something like App Engine.
> >>>> Any insights would be helpful.
> >>>>
> >>>> - Scott
> >>
> >>
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