[no1youknowz]

You'd be surprised about how many people don't know this. I had an expectation to scale past 1B users. I was trialling AWS when I realised through testing that it was this way. It could not deal with sudden spikes of traffic.

Suffice to say, I went elsewhere.

[pjc50]

A billion users? Are you Facebook or the Olympics?

[no1youknowz]

Neither. But once you start doing something like serving ads. The paradigm shifts. Of course, what I do is a lot more intensive/complex. But I'll say this to get the basics across.

[krisdol]

It doesn't take facebook. I'm in a small adtech company. Tens of billions of requests a month is not unexpected.

[bradhe]

> Tens of billions of requests a month is not unexpected.

10000000000 / (60 * 60 * 24 * 30) = 3,858 req/sec. That's a pretty good clip.

[manigandham]

That's a small adtech company. The larger ones do that per day with some over 50B/daily.

[bradhe]

Yep. I spent some time working for one of the largest.

[dano]

We see 10,000 req/sec on a regular basis.

[bdcravens]

It's not always _users_, but requests. As companies embrace microservices, I think you'll see a moderately sized application pushing tons of requests over HTTP that would normally have used a different protocol

[CodyReichert]

Where did you go, if you don't mind expanding?

[no1youknowz]

I don't mind. I went with dedicated hosting. I found a supplier which had their own scalable infrastructure. They already had clients which had ad server type applications that scaled into the Billions and could handle traffic spikes. With that type of setup, it was a no brainer.

I'm a sysadmin with over 10 years with Linux. So for me to setup and support servers is pretty trivial.

The agreement I had with the supplier. They managed the network and hardware 24/7. I managed the setup and support of the servers from the OS up. This arrangement worked well and I had zero downtime.

[threeseed]

> I went with dedicated hosting

This doesn't get mentioned as much as it should but there are VPS/dedicated providers who are very close to AWS DCs.

Enough so that for many use cases you should have your database in AWS and your app servers on dedictated hardware. Best of both worlds.

[mathrawka]

Can you share a list of providers that are close to AWS DCs?

[matt_wulfeck]

Pretty much any data center in Virginia will be close to US-EAST. If you contact them for setting up direct connect pipes they'll also provide you with a list of locations to check out.

[manigandham]

You'll have to compare regions depending on providers. Softlayer has pretty good coverage with matching regions and low latency.

[sbierwagen]

  I don't mind. I went with self hosting. I found a supplier 
  which had their own scalable infrastructure.

That's a little vague. By "self-hosting" you mean Linux VMs, like EC2, right, or something more abstracted than that? What supplier?

[no1youknowz]

Sorry, I just updated the post. I meant dedicated hosting. So bare-metal machines.

If you want to know the supplier. They are called Mojohost.

http://www.mojohost.com/

[toomuchtodo]

When you need performance, bare metal is always the way to go.

[matt_wulfeck]

This saying holds such little value for so many engineers. They want uptime, ease of management, and security.

Most people aren't worried about squeezing another 3% performance out of thei servers. In fact I would say the slice-and-dice nature of VMs allows for better overall capacity usage because of over provisioning of resources. How many apps do you know that hover at 0.07 load all day long?

[joe563323]

All they say is it costs 125$. 125$ for what ? They do not mention the specs of the hardware in their website.

[beanstalknoob]

If you hadn't been a sysadmin, would still have chosen dedicated hosting? (Given that you have serious scaling requirements, of course). In other words: Would it be realistic to say that a service like Elastic Beanstalk saves on hiring a sysadmin?

[devonkim]

Sysadmins / operations people should be able to handle anything below an OS better than your usual devops guys that would be able to build you a variation of EBS and their value further depends upon if your software has special needs that are not suitable for cloud / virtualized infrastructure.

I've heard of many start-up companies save plenty of money using dedicated hosting even without any operations / sysadmin pros around scaling to millions of users when the equivalent in AWS with relatively anemic nodes fared much better. In fact, WhatsApp only had a handful of physical servers handling billions of real users and associated internal messaging and they had developers as the on-call operations engineers.

I'm an ops engineer / developer and I'd use dedicated hosting if success depends a lot upon infrastructure costs. For example, if I started a competitor to Heroku at the same time they did, I'd definitely be having a very careful debate between dedicated / colo hosting and using a cloud provider tied intimately with my growth plans. Many companies have shockingly bad operations practices but achieve decent availability (and more importantly for most situations, profitability) just fine, so even the often-cited expectations of better networks and availability zones may be worth the risks of not caring that much.

[manigandham]

We went to Softlayer with their smallest instances running Nginx to load balance everything. Much faster and cheaper.

[matt_wulfeck]

Why in the world would you assume any off-the-shelf solution would serve a billion users?

Unlike many cloud providers AWS can be setup to serve a billion requests but you need to think that mess out from start to end. You can't setup an elb, turn on auto scale and then go out to lunch.

[manigandham]

Why not? That's exactly the use case, if you dont need to prewarm for bursty loads. It'll just be extremely expensive.

Also, as another comment here says, I believe a billion "users" is more like "requests" as users is vague and undefined. A single person could launch 1 or 100 requests depending on the app.

[semerda]

What other vendor did you go with and now looking back was it worth it from a cost & operational perspective?

Why not work with AWS to mitigate such risks now that you know more about ELBs?