slashdotmsiriv - Slashdot User

Submission + - How to handle flash crowds from your garage

Submitted by slashdotmsiriv on Sunday July 06, 2008 @04:16PM

slashdotmsiriv writes: For years, developers and researchers have been refining way to scale Internet services to larger and larger capacities. However, racks full of web servers, database replicas, and load balancing switches require a significant up-front investment. For popular sites, where load is consistently high, it is easy to justify this investment; the resources will not be idle. Less popular sites can not justify the expense of large idle capacity. The burning question is how can a low-traffic garage-innovator site make the transition to high-traffic when the slashdot hordes make that transition without warning?

This article describes the issues and tradeoffs a typical garage innovator encounters when building low-cost, scalable Internet services. This is a more formal analysis of the problem and solutions discussed here regarding Animoto's sudden need to scale-up. In addition, the article offers an overview of current state of utility computing (S3, EC2 etc) and of the most common strategies for building scalable Internet services.

Seems that utility computing is the way of the future for scalable network services; it would be nice to know how to make best use of it.

Submission + - Russia's floating nuclear plants

Submitted by slashdotmsiriv on Friday April 20, 2007 @05:49AM

slashdotmsiriv writes: Russia has started building the world's first floating nuclear power station. Russian officials view the highly mobile nuclear power plants on ships as a safe way to power remote isolated areas, without the risk of nuclear proliferation. Greenpeace however, strongly disagrees with this approach and calls it "The most dangerous project that has been launched by the atomic sector in the whole world over the past decade"

Judging by the safety record of reactors in submarines and icebreaking ships, is Greenpeace once again overreacting over nuclear power? Also, who will have administrative control over those ships, Russia or the hosting country?

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