Tuesday, November 9, 2010

A thought experiment

I remember back in the day when companies needed to raise millions of dollars to set up their web farm. One of the upsides of doing that was that people thought big, they dreamed of taking over the world. These days of running a clustered multi-tier web app stack on AWS for pocket change has lead to people having small dreams.

So, how about we do some maths. Let's say you have $10k a day in budget to burn on compute resources. What could you do with it? Let's take numbers from AWS, they quote Linux Double Extra Large High Memory instances at $1 an hour. So, at 24 hours a day, we have about 416 instances. That is approximately 13TB of RAM, and over 1.6k cores. Now what can you do with that much RAM and CPU?