On the way to perfect computing

I found very interesting site, and the guy who leads it is also keen on distributed and scalable stuff. So, if you have a time,
just make a break and read a couple of enjoyable posts on scalability and certainly browse the library at http://www.royans.net/arch/

OK, I think I’ll write a couple of posts related to links from that library. Let’s return to the Smugmug team whose story I found on royans site.

Smugmug.com, a 5 year old company with just 23 employees has 315000 paying customers and 195 million photographs. CEO & Chief Geek Don MacAskill has a nice set of slides(See references section) where he talks about its 5 year journey during which it went from small startup to a profitable business. The talk was given during Amazon Startup project so it talks mostly about how it uses AWS (Amazon Web services).

Other than wonderful fun loving employees who are also super heroes in his eyes, he talks about the how they are doubling the storage requirements on an yearly basis. They already have about 300 TB in use, and as of today all of that is on Amazon S3. Don estimates that based on his estimates, for the storage they are using, they are saving about 500K per year which is pretty big for a small operation like theirs.

Don MacAskill’s slides:

References

1. Link to a movie at slideshare.net
2. PDF slides for the presentation