[Swift-devel] Swift-issues (PBS+NFS Cluster)

[Tim Freeman]

On Tue, 12 May 2009 15:59:50 -0500
Ioan Raicu <iraicu at cs.uchicago.edu> wrote:

> I see the numbers, but my instinct says that they can't scale EBS 
> performance linearly with every EC2 instance they can start. Perhaps EBS 
> is currently underutilized, so much that the EBS servers are relatively 
> idle. 

Well, they charge extra money when you use it, presumably using some kind of
cost-plus model.  If demand (relative to raw instance demand) increases
noticeably, I'd bet they will then be able to afford to add more EBS capacity
to keep up. They explicitly advertise it as better than local disk (and AWS has
an excellent track record of doing what they say).

You may be right about not scaling with every EC2 instance they can start at
the moment, but that doesn't really matter when you have 100ks of customers and
nodes, you just need to look at trends and plan accordingly.

Tim