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 ...

More Search Solutions

Nige has been invited back to speak at the Search Solutions 2008 conference for a third time.

This annual event is organised by the British Computer Society's Information Retrieval Specialist Group (IRSG) and will be held in London on Tuesday, 24th of September.

Network at the Pub

We had another enjoyable Flag and Bell networking event on Tuesday night. The rain held off as our pub crawl took us from the Anchor Pub down cobbled side streets to Brew Wharf near London Bridge. Thanks again to PCR Recruitment for sponsoring drinks at the first pub.

Congratulations to the JMMK team for winning this month's quiz. Thanks to Wordtracker.com, Userplane.com and for this month's prizes.
The Flag and Bell also made it in to TNT Magazine on Monday. Check out the article, Network at the pub, on page 96.