Comments on: Why should I pay for this AWS design decision?

By: Calvin Spealman

Calvin Spealman — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 04:22:19 +0000

Fault tolerance is just something you should expect to need, and that is all this is. The system is designed for massive scale, so obviously there is a trade off for the lower end of use.

Kind of ironic how Amazon and Google and friends built these massively scaling platforms, turned around to sell them to others, just to have an enormous number of teeny, tiny things running on them.

By: Alaa Salman

Alaa Salman — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:34:08 +0000

I believe that this design decision is shared by all distributed, fault-tolerant system. I was reading an article about their SimpleDB, i think, where they said that the system sync occurs after like 6 minutes or so. So you can’t count it for any real time data handling.

Think about it, how can you make a distributed fault-tolerant system which acts synchronously?

How the system updates(and thus how frequently), of course, is another matter. There’s a lot of potential for innovation here.

By: Ben Bangert

Ben Bangert — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:15:34 +0000

Also, the latest boto’s SQS appears to be broken entirely. This is what I found out with our companies project when I accidentally used easy_install and got the latest boto. Reverting down to boto 0.9d apparently remedies the situation. I’d suggest trying 0.9d and using the fetch_queue, cause with the latest boto, it always came back empty.

By: Wes Felter

Wes Felter — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:39:08 +0000

Amazon would have us believe that you have to pay one way or the other; presumably they chose eventual consistency because it is cheaper to implement than the alternatives.