Thursday, August 14, 2008

SNAP! Stretching the Elastic Computing Cloud

Trexy successfully migrated to the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (ec2) a few months ago.

Last month I migrated the much larger Turbo10 cluster (our sister search engine) into the Cloud. Turbo10's advertising network currently receives over 30 million search hits per day and close to 1 billion searches per month, so its capacity requirements are much higher than Trexy.

We launched over 20 machines in the Cloud to service Turbo10's incoming load and were alarmed when many of the machines turned red. The load was way too high. "Quick! Launch more machines!!"

Then suddenly we received this message from Amazon, "Sorry - machine quota exceeded." SNAP!! It seems we'd stretched the 'elastic' in elastic computing too far. What followed was an anxious wait until someone from Amazon manually increased our quota.

Things are now running fine and both search engines are now happily situated in the Cloud. Phew!

Now I'd better get back to designing the next version of Trexy ...

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