Besides a lot of profiling of our code, its amazing how many people dont ever do this...we rely heavily on micros in production.
A lot of people will tell you using micros in production is a bad idea, and dont get me wrong...for most people it is a bad idea. Our findings are that micros are reliable and if you use them correctly you are going to be OK.
Where we used to have 2 smalls, we can afford around 8 micros before the cost becomes an issue. This is a significant benefit in that it increases our availability (Basically we're in each region and every availability zone). We have two main systems, the web frontend and our monitoring nodes. Nodes exist in a specific region, and report back to the central storage system via API.
The main feature of our platform which enables us to scale using such small systems is that our CPU demand is very predictable. There are no "hourly jobs" or anything that would spike CPU, everything is done throughout the hour and if we need more work to get done, we simply add more servers.
We are going to do a big write up on this in a few weeks, check our blog (http://www.verelo.com/blog) or HN for the post when it comes out.
A lot of people will tell you using micros in production is a bad idea, and dont get me wrong...for most people it is a bad idea. Our findings are that micros are reliable and if you use them correctly you are going to be OK.
Where we used to have 2 smalls, we can afford around 8 micros before the cost becomes an issue. This is a significant benefit in that it increases our availability (Basically we're in each region and every availability zone). We have two main systems, the web frontend and our monitoring nodes. Nodes exist in a specific region, and report back to the central storage system via API.
The main feature of our platform which enables us to scale using such small systems is that our CPU demand is very predictable. There are no "hourly jobs" or anything that would spike CPU, everything is done throughout the hour and if we need more work to get done, we simply add more servers.
We are going to do a big write up on this in a few weeks, check our blog (http://www.verelo.com/blog) or HN for the post when it comes out.