Pattern Eight: Lightweight Models & Cost-Effective Scalability

10 05 2010

Adopting a scalable, cost-effective strategy in your business model and technology can help to deliver products to market faster and cheaper without sacrificing future growth. This is part of a successful Web 2.0 business. Many online companies/businesses started out very small and have grown to something much bigger. This growth can be in terms of technology or staffing. Wikipedia for example started out with only 22 staff members even though it is the 7th largest site on the internet. There are many benefits to this such as:

•Faster time to market
•Faster Return on Investment through reduced cost and time
•Reduced risk of project and product failure
•Greater adaptability & scalability

In terms of growth in technology take Digg for example. Digg started with $2,000, a single hosted server ($99 per-month), free open source software, and an outsourced $10 per-hour developer from Elance. Digg has currently grown to serve more than 100 million page views a day and more than 90 servers, but still only has 15 staff.

Myspace Logo

Myspace Logo

The example I want to talk about this week is Myspace. Myspace is a social networking site that has grown immensely since it was first started. Myspace’s growth has been more on the technology side then the staffing side. It has also grown widely with members since its beginning.

The key to Myspaces’ success is in its Business Model. A feature that attracts many musicians is the introduction of the ‘MySpace Music’ section, which allows anyone to create a MySpace music profile and upload their own work to the Internet in hopes of being discovered. However, the immense success of this feature was heard throughout the world which lead to many up-and-coming solo musicians  going major, all of which are success stories of their own levels with endless futures of super-stardom. If an artist has been ranked high in the daily MySpace top-artists section for his work they will have many hits and more chance of becoming a major artist. Another main feature of Myspace is its high amount of advertising. This gives the company a lot of advertising revenue.

Advertising on Myspace

Advertising on Myspace

Now lets take a look at Myspaces’ growth in terms of technology. MySpace started small, with two Web servers talking to a single database server. Originally, they were 2-processor Dell servers loaded with 4 gigabytes of memory. But at 500,000 accounts, which MySpace reached in early 2004, the workload became too much for a single database. MySpace then ran on three SQL Server databases. As MySpace registration passed 1 million accounts and was closing in on 2 million, the service began knocking up against the input/output (I/O) capacity of the database servers—the speed at which they were capable of reading and writing data. At 2 million accounts, MySpace also switched from using storage devices directly attached to its database servers to a storage area network(SAN). The change to a SAN boosted performance, uptime and reliability.

By mid-2004, MySpace had arrived at the point where it had to make what Web developers call the “scale up” versus “scale out” decision—whether to scale up to bigger, more powerful and more expensive servers, or spread out the database workload across lots of relatively cheap servers. Fast forward a few years and Myspace grew to 3 data centers, 2682 web servers, 90 cache servers, 60 database servers, 150 media processing servers, 1000 SAN storage disks, and consumes 17,000 MB per second of bandwidth. Now that is a massive difference to when they first began.

For a bigger look at the 10 best things you can learn about scalability from sites like Myspace visit this site: http://www.caffeinatedcoder.com/10-lessons-in-scalability-from-myspace/

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