Everything Else

I figure some of you might enjoy this slightly breezy article about how Paper scaled its web servers to handle publishing semi-naked photos of Kim Kardashian: https://medium.com/message/how-paper-ma ... 67f8d37688

Worthwhile if only for this paragraph:

One of the things nerds love to do is look at other people’s stacks and say, “what a house of cards!” In fact I fully expect people to link to this article and write things like, “sounds okay, but they should have used Jizzawatt with the Hamstring extensions and Graunt.ns for all their smexing.”

I'm definitely guilty of ridiculing someone's approach to smexing. I did it just last week, in fact.

(h/t DaringFireball )

The web has changed so much. Pretty glad I don't do that shit no more, aside from random JS debugging...

LOL. Excellent! I remember that movie!

josehill wrote: I figure some of you might enjoy this slightly breezy article about how Paper scaled its web servers to handle publishing semi mostly-naked photos of Kim Kardashian...

It was kind of funny, gracias josé but Haysoos ... two things :

There are people who read that crap ? I don't mean Enquirer -style tabloid crap, I know there is a market for that in the trailer parks. But Paper ... what a pile of pretentious stewpid worthless shit

And then the article genuflecting to the brilliant IT Professional who managed to make a website scale in the cloud. Umm, I thought that was the point of The Cloud * ? Load-sharing and adding servers ("big" servers, tho, not those "little" ones. Maybe that was the secret, he used a six-rack Origin 2000 ?) is supposed to be magic now ? He called Amazon and asked them to tack on another five servers, whoopee ? He actually did his job, omigod, we should send him roses and bottles of whiskey ? So the next time you get on a bus and the driver manages to keep it in his own lane and doesn't run into a train, all the passengers should send him gifts and Christmas cards ? wtf ? Doing your job is worth a magazine article now ?

Scary

* What would have been impressive is if The Cloud were smart enough to auto-scale itself. Now that could be an interesting technical story. And really, it should be able to do that.

hamei wrote: What would have been impressive is if The Cloud were smart enough to auto-scale itself. Now that could be an interesting technical story. And really, it should be able to do that.

To be fair, things are getting much closer to that, and the tools mentioned in the article are part of the reason why. It's true that from an information architecture standpoint, there's nothing wildly different than what we envisioned when we were scaling Origins fifteen years ago, but from a tools perspective, scaling things are leaps and bounds better, simpler, and more generally automated and automatable than they were even three or four years ago.

While you have a point in saying that this guy was just doing his job, the truth is that I see companies every day with technologists who are not at all current on "cloud" tech, and they are holding their companies back in terms of capabilities and costs because of it.