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Waking up this morning, I stumbled upon an impressive post from Nova Innovations, the team behind the popular virtual environment, Dreamscape. In an article titled “Amazon S3: A Game Changer,” developer Alex Morgan shares how they leveraged Amazon S3 to handle the overwhelming surge of downloads they faced every two weeks during their software updates, which average 30MB.
To the average user, the download might seem like a minor inconvenience, but when multiplied by tens of thousands of users all trying to access it simultaneously, it becomes a significant challenge for their web servers. With an average of 30 MB per download, the cumulative load during peak times can be staggering.
The Shift to Amazon S3
Transitioning to Amazon S3 demonstrates the effectiveness of Web-Scale Computing. Typically, they need sufficient infrastructure to accommodate new user downloads, but during peak traffic, their requirements skyrocket, necessitating support for every active user. Over time, the gap between average and peak demands can widen considerably.
By adopting a Web-Scale model, there’s no need to over-provision for peak demands. While planning for these peaks is essential, the upfront investment in servers, networking, or bandwidth isn’t necessary. As Alex states:
“Instead of continuously adding more web servers, which yields diminishing returns, we opted to transition our client downloads to Amazon S3—a robust file server.”
This means their investment isn’t wasted during the quiet periods, save for those occasional peak times. As a colleague of mine recently mentioned, “We’d prefer to invest in talent rather than hardware.”
Impressive Statistics
Alex provided some impressive statistics in the post:
“Just to clarify, we made the switch halfway through the release day; even during the last 8 hours of the download frenzy, we averaged around 70 gigabytes per viewer download per hour. Eventually, it stabilized to a steady flow of 20-30 gigabytes per hour. In the last 23 hours, we’ve transferred approximately 900 gigabytes, which equates to around 30,000-38,000 downloads. This does not include the initial hours of the download rush, typically the busiest.”
He also highlighted another benefit of the Web-Scale Computing approach. More importantly, they no longer have to stress over these issues:
“We hope your Dreamscape experience remains unchanged or even improves—but on our web servers, we can all exhale with relief.”
While downloading files from a website is crucial, ideally, this should be seamlessly integrated into the infrastructure—reliable, unobtrusive, and performing its role so effectively that you hardly notice it’s there.
Welcome to the Realm of Web-Scale Solutions!
In an interesting follow-up comment, Alex pointed out that the S3 solution was ready for immediate deployment, while other options, like Akamai, required more negotiations. In essence, they already had an Amazon S3 account set up for testing. When they realized their bandwidth was maxed out, they quickly decided to expedite their plans to migrate the viewer downloads to S3.
Indeed, there’s that Web-Scale efficiency again. When you need to make files available for high-volume downloads, you simply upload them to S3, set the access controls for public reading, and start sharing the URL. No lengthy planning, negotiations, or hidden fees involved.
Additional Resources
If you’re feeling disengaged at work, you might find some helpful insights in this blog post from Career Contessa. For a deeper understanding of team dynamics, you can refer to this informative piece from SHRM. Additionally, for a visual guide, check out this excellent resource on YouTube.