Archive
Amazon S3: The "speed of light" problem
I was interviewed yesterday by Beth Pariseau for an article about Amazon’s S3 at SearchStorage.com. All-in-all I think it’s a good article that covers some of Amazon’s strengths and weaknesses, but would like to clarify some of my quotes in the article.
I’m quoted as having no read speed issues, but having write speed problems. As is common in articles like this, that’s boiling down a long conversation and much is lost in the translation. 🙂 In reality, Amazon has been blazingly fast for us (both reads and writes), relatively speaking, except for the few times they’ve had problems, which I’ve blogged about before. That particular quote, especially about it being less than a 10th of a second, was my attempt to explain the “speed of light” problem, which applies to both read and writes. Even mighty Amazon hasn’t yet figured out how to transfer data at faster-than-light speeds. 🙂
Basically, we’re in California and Amazon isn’t. This means that when we initiate a read or a write to S3, we’re sending bytes to them and they have to cover, at minimum, the physical distance to Amazon’s datacenters (wherever they are) before anything can be done. Assuming that one of their datacenters in on the East Coast, and assuming we have to read or write from that one occasionally, we’re talking 60-80ms of time just to get bits there and back. No-one on Planet Earth can get around this problem, so it bears consideration when you’re planning for S3 usage.
Obviously, our data in our own datacenters suffers from this problem too – only it’s inches, instead of thousands of miles, to our servers, so it’s almost negligible. But we do have clients all over the world, so the problem is still very real. Our friends Down Under, for example, have to wait much longer for their photos to start drawing than our friends at the Googleplex down the street. If we really wanted to solve that problem, we’d have to build or use a CDN (Content Distribution Network). So far, we haven’t wanted to.
Beth mentions how Bob Ippolito at Mochi Media got better performance in Taipei with CacheFly than with Amazon S3. To me, this seems sorta obvious. To my knowledge, S3 doesn’t have a datacenter in Asia at all, and secondly, they’re not a CDN. Let me say that again – they’re not a CDN. Amazon has their issues they need to overcome with S3, but dinging them for lower performance than a CDN is sorta silly. S3 doesn’t provide web search faster than Google either. See my point?
I’m sure Amazon has thought (or is thinking?) about extending S3 to offer CDN services, but I believe the way Amazon builds these things, it’d probably be a separate service that could be layered on top of S3. They’re into offering building blocks which you can mix & match, not complicated services that do too much. (To any would-be Amazon Web Services competitors reading this, the building block approach is the Right Way to do this.)
Beth’s article is right on the money with regards to data transfer costs, though. S3 currently has two sweet spots: small companies who can’t buy large bandwidth, and companies who need a lot of storage but not a lot of transfers. There are, of course, companies which need a lot of transfers but not much storage (CDNs are probably appropriate here), and companies which need a lot of transfers AND a lot of storage. SmugMug potentially falls into this latter category, but you can imagine someone like YouTube falling into it even more than we do. How they solve the different requirements of different companies will be interesting to watch.
Let me reiterate in case it’s not abundantly clear: I love S3. It’s saved us tons of money. I’m a normal, paying customer – not an Amazon shill. It has problems and growing pains, just like every single other online site or service you can name. It may not be right for you – but it’s certainly right for a ton of us.
I address the “speed of light” issue (and some ways of minimizing it) and the whole “sweet spot” pricing issue on my ETech talk (which I’m still working on). If there’s anything specific you’d like to see, be sure to let me know – I’ll be posting the slides here.
How we hire at SmugMug
Apologies for the lack of an egregious pun in my title. I’m afraid I don’t have the talent for it that Mike over at Atlassian has, but he called me out in his Life is a Hire Way post so I’m compelled to respond. 🙂
First of all, we don’t have all the answers. In fact, I doubt we have many at all. Hiring is *very* difficult. One could argue that it’s the most difficult thing when building a business. If you’re really good at it, you probably get it really right 33% of the time, really wrong 33% of the time, and the rest of the time you sorta get warm bodies in seats. Not exactly stellar.
SmugMug has 20 employees and we’re in our 6th year. So we haven’t done a lot of it here, but we’ve run other companies, and what we have done here has been interesting. So far, we’re well above the percentages I mentioned above. Almost every single one of our hires has been perfect.
Here are some of my insights:
Get the right people on the bus (and get the wrong people off). Jim Collins wrote the best business book of all time, Good to Great, and his chapter on people is prophetic. You’ve got to hire the right people, no matter what. If the right person knocks on your door, and you don’t have a position for her, hire her anyway. Find a way. Then find a seat for her. Keep moving her from seat to seat until there’s one that’s just right – but get her in the door first. Likewise, if someone doesn’t belong on your bus, get rid of them. Keeping them around longer will only damage your company and morale. One of our very best hires, Andy Williams, kept knocking on our door. We knew we wanted to hire him, we weren’t even sure what we wanted him to do, and we knew we couldn’t afford him. We found a way, we found a seat for him on the bus, and he’s had a profound impact on our company.
Hire for passion first, talent second. Given a choice between a world-class, stellar developer who wasn’t in love with our vision and a passionate hacker with limited experience, I’ll take the passionate hacker any day. Talent can be taught and learned, passion can’t. Of course, there has to be a foundation there – hiring someone who’s never touched code to write heavy-duty software isn’t wise. But you get the point. Passion is vital. (And I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised how often talent AND passion go hand-in-hand once you weed out the dispassionate).
Passion for the job, not passion for the company. I’m thrilled when I talk to people who are passionate about SmugMug and want to work here. I truly am. But what I’m really looking for is a passion for your specific job. Do you love taking care of customers and want to be a SmugMug Support Hero? Do you eat, drink, breathe, and sleep datacenter operations and dream of a fully-managed well-oiled machine devoid of human contact? Does improving customer interaction with their priceless memories make your heart beat faster? You’re our type of person. Passion for the company is icing on the cake. Kathy Sierra’s excellent blog has an interesting take on this concept, too.
Look for failure. SmugMug wouldn’t be here today if I hadn’t tanked another company and wasted lots of my own money. I learn best from failures, and I believe others do, too. I don’t want you to hide your failures – instead, I’d rather you highlight them, explain what went wrong, and most importantly, what you learned from the experience. Too much success without struggle breeds overconfidence and can stangate growth. Everyone blows it. Anyone at SmugMug can attest to the fact that I talk to myself when coding and the most common phrase I utter is “Don, you’re so dumb!” You’re going to fail from time-to-time at SmugMug, too. How you deal with it is important.
Getting stuff done. There is definitely a place in this world for people who do pure research. I love those people, and I love the magic they invent. There isn’t a place for that at SmugMug, though. We’re a family of doers. I spend close to 90% of my time thinking about a problem before I start working on it, but when it comes time to pull that trigger, I *move*. There’s no room at a tiny company for people who don’t move at a frantic pace.
Embrace diversity. Another fantastic book is James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds. In it, he’ll open your eyes about group thinking and why innovative ideas come from diverse groups. If everyone thinks the way you do, not only will you never have new innovative ideas, but you’ll never be called upon to really think about and defend your ideas. Having spirited debate inside your company is vital to success. When I’m about to propose a new idea at SmugMug, I *know* people in the company are going to attack my idea before I even walk into the room – so I come mentally prepared to do battle. This sounds scary, but in reality, it’s a good thing. I’ll have thought through my idea to the best of my ability, but the 19 other people at the company will also do the same thing, and they’re all a lot smarter than I am. Vastly more important than their intelligence, though, is the fact that they all think differently than I do. They see the problem differently, they see the solution differently. And the idea gets that much better after it’s been beaten around the room.
Hire your own customers. This has turned out to be the single most important hiring decision we’ve made. And it builds upon all of the other items above. Through our strong user community, we’ve been able to identify stand-out people who are already familiar with our product, passionate about helping people use our product, and in love with the idea of working their magic here at SmugMug. The vocal, passionate true believers – you know who I’m talking about, they’ve cornered you at parties and forced you to buy a TiVo – those are the ones to get on the bus. Get them on the bus, re-arrange some seating if you have to, but likely this is their dream job and likely they’re a dream hire. Almost all of our best hires have come from our user base.
So there you have it. There are probably others that’ll come to mind, but those are the biggies.
And since I think this is a great Meme to spread, I’ll tag 5 other people I know and see if we can get some more insight: Jonathan, Tim, Craig, Stewart, and Ashely. (I’m trying to find out if Ashley has a blog or not, she’s a recruiting manager at Google. If not, I’ll replace her with another tag.)
UPDATE: Craig Newmark just got back to me with his answer. He insists his recommendation is to “turn hiring over to someone who’s good at it” and mentions Jim Buckmaster. Alas, Jim doesn’t blog AFAIK, so I can’t pass the tag along. Oh, and Stewart is traveling. Let’s hope Tim, Jonathan, or Ashely come through. 🙂
Why OpenID at SmugMug?
We announced OpenID support last week. I then responded to some comments asking us why we were a provider first, rather than a consumer. Now, I’m answering some more comments basically asking why they should care about OpenID and how it helps SmugMug customers.
Honestly, I had no idea it wouldn’t be obvious how great this is. To me, the picture seems perfectly clear. There are no dastardly designs or secret agendas – to me, it just makes sense. Here’s are a few reasons why:
We are a pay site. Every SmugMug customer pays for the right to share their photos here. They get what they pay for. That comes with both pluses and minuses where identity is concerned, though. On the one hand, we have a much much stronger relationship with our customers than somewhere free like Hotmail, for example. On the other, we have no good mechanism to interact with viewers, who don’t and shouldn’t have to pay (or even sign up) to see their friends’ photos.
Let’s talk about the pluses first. There’s a much higher level of trust and respect between the customer and SmugMug than a free email provider. They feel secure in knowing that we treat their data carefully and with respect. They consider SmugMug to be their home (or at least a major part of their home) online. They strongly identify with the brand and even more strongly identify with the fact that their memories are stored and shared from our servers. They identify with us.
Do you see where I’m going with this? While everyone has multiple identities online, from email to IM, blogs to photo sharing, the ones where there is a volume of priceless content, such as their photo-sharing site or blog, are the ones our customers identify with the most. Email addresses are “less permanent” since they’re free, easy to forward, etc. Ask your typical passionate Flickr or SmugMug customer, though, and they’ll tell you about their passion for their photos and the pain and anguish it would cause them to move or if the service died. Note that not everyone falls into this category – but those passionate about photo sharing *do* fall into this category, and that describes every SmugMug customer.
Further, I believe the customer should get to choose which site they identify with most. I’d hate to limit them to only their email provider if they happen to hate their email provider. Just like everyone resonates with different brands of cars, jeans, computers, music, etc, they also resonate with different sites. Leave the power in the hands of the customer – let them choose their own identity.
Now, let’s talk minuses. Since there are no free accounts at SmugMug, we can’t interact as well with our viewers. They’re allergic to setting up “yet another account,” something I resonate with, or even passing over their email address. I completely get that – it really really sucks when you go to view someone’s photos at KodakGallery or Shutterfly and they demand your email address so you can get spammed till the end of days. It also sucks when you want to leave a comment at Flickr but can’t without signing up for a Yahoo account. What a pain.
OpenID goes a long way towards solving some of these problems. Comments can now be far more spam-free since identity can be verified, yet the commenter doesn’t have to go through the hassle of signing up for yet-another-account. Access controls to photos and galleries can be specified by the owner of the photos in such a way that sensitive data (like email addresses or passwords) no longer has to be exchanged. Even if we wanted to, SmugMug couldn’t spam someone using their OpenID to leave a comment or view a photo. That’s big – I hate giving my email address out to sites because so many of them *do* spam, you’re never sure which ones are the “good guys” like we are.
OpenID isn’t perfect. There’s no trust here – just identification. There’s still no complete single sign-on. There are issues with dangling stale IDs being left around. Consumer education is going to be interesting. But it’s still a huge step in the right direction. Just verifying that someone has an identity somewhere online gives you the ability to make your apps richer, regulate abuse more easily, and generally improve the user experience.
What’s not to love?
Yahoo, YUI, & Browser History
Today, the YUI blog mentions they’ve released a great new version. As you probably know, we’re a huge fan of YUI – we couldn’t have done our fantastic new UI without it. We’ll be at the YUI party this week, celebrating with everyone else.
However…
When talking about the new Browser History Manager, they mention that “No one, as far as we know, has resolved the technical issues in a satisfactory way across the A-Grade.” Alas, that’s just not true – SmugMug has solved this technical issue, and we did it first. What’s more, the YUI team knows about it – we had lunch with them and told them exactly how we did it. Their Safari implementation is exactly the same as what we did and explained. We even offered to give our code back to them under a BSD license so they wouldn’t have to duplicate our work.
It looks like they missed one technical detail of our implementation, though. Safari has an issue with “permathrobber” (basically, the Safari throbber never stops throbbing) which we managed to solve.
Note that I’m not upset that they have a great Browser History Manager – far from it. I just wish they’d give us a little credit where credit is due, given that we pimp YUI any chance we get for them.
We built it first, they know it, and sharing the love is the right thing to do.
UPDATE: Just called Yahoo and the love is still flowing. 🙂 Turns out the two guys who wrote the Browser History Manager are new to the team, weren’t at our lunch, and had no idea what we were doing. Great minds think alike. 🙂 And Yahoo can’t accept our code currently, even under a BSD license, but they’re working hard at getting that changed. Sounds like an internal big-company roadblock.
This is your Mac on drugs
Why the web can look wonky on a Mac by Chris MacAskill, President of SmugMug
The PC is a soldier. When Direktor Gates demands color #e3823c, PC responds “Sir, Yes Sir!!” Color #e3823c looks identical on the PC whether it’s in a JPEG, GIF, PNG, CSS, or HTML.
The only colors Direktor Gates tolerates are found in the box of crayons called sRGB. Internet standards like HTML, CSS and Flash march in step with the same colors.
The Mac Thinks Different. Color #e3823c is different on Macs. Except sometimes*.
If you have a Mac with Safari, check out this wonkiness (if you don’t, here’s a screen shot). Now check the page with Firefox. It looks completely different than it does in Safari, and different from Firefox and Internet Explorer on the PC.
Why this is a big deal:
Most people don’t have light-controlled rooms with color-calibrated monitors. I don’t, and you probably don’t, either. Almost everyone will see your photos slightly differently than the next person. We’re not talking about perfect color precision here, because on the net, that’s an impossibility.
What *is* important, though, is for your photo to match the rest of the page. If you’ve selected a background on a PC to match the blue in your subject’s eyes, you don’t want background and eyes to be mismatched on a Mac. Or your photo to look different in some Mac web browsers than it does in Photoshop.
Yet this is exactly what’s happening. And the fix is simple.
Demystifying the wonk:
#1: Macs ship with a display gamma of 1.8. The word gamma was probably chosen to make it sound like nuclear physics, but it’s fairly simple. It’s a setting, like brightness or contrast, that adjusts your image. Halfway between black & white (midtones) the changes are greatest; they change less as the colors get darker or lighter.
If you’re a mime with white makeup and black clothes, photos of you on the Internet will look similar on Macs and PCs. But if you’re gorgeously mid-toned, you’ll lose some of your tan on a Mac. Except sometimes*.
Internet standards, including HTML, CSS, and Flash, are based on a gamma of 2.2, making colors partway between black & white appear darker and higher contrast than 1.8 gamma makes them appear. Examples.
#2: Some Mac browsers (IE, Safari and Omniweb) go part way in preserving the artist’s intent: if you know what an ICC profile is, you can attach it to your photo and the Mac will render your photo with a gamma of 2.2. Then it will look like it does in Photoshop on your Mac, or on the Internet on PCs.
There are three problems:
- Safari still won’t know to adjust the rest of the page, such as borders drawn in CSS or background colors specified in HTML, leaving you with color mismatches like you saw on the wonkiness page.
- Other Mac browsers like Camino, Opera and Firefox don’t know for ICC profiles. The good news is they don’t get color mismatches. The bad news is nothing on the page matches your intent. (Except sometimes*.)
- Very few photos on the web have ICC profiles because they slow down browsing, especially on thumbnail-sized images. In this case, Safari doesn’t render them with a gamma of 2.2 unless your monitor is set to 2.2.
#3: PNG images have their own issues with Safari, unless they’re specially prepared, as you saw near the bottom of the wonkiness page. Read it and weep.
What’s this ‘except sometimes’?
If your Mac’s gamma is already at 2.2, you’re golden. Unfortunately, this is rare. Macs ship with a default gamma of 1.8, even though Apple recommends you and your friends change your gamma to 2.2. Here’s what they say:
If you calibrate your monitor with a Huey, for example, you’ll be asked what you do with your Mac. If you answer photo editing and web surfing, it will quietly set your gamma to 2.2 to make web pages match the artists intent. The good news: theoretically, now web pages look the same in Firefox & Safari — and on the PC. Photos look the same as they do in Photoshop. And in print. Color mismatches disappear.
In practice, devices like the Huey are not 100% accurate and the calibration they provide is influenced by the room’s lighting. So if you’re using Safari, you’ll probably notice that color mismatches will be reduced but not gone on the wonkiness page.
If you want to see almost no mismatches on the wonkiness page, go to Apple > System Preferences > Displays > Color > and pick sRGB IEC61966-2.1. Then quit Safari and restart it. Now everything should be as it is on a PC except the PNG may not match perfectly. It will match in Firefox.
What would Photoshop do?
If your monitor is set to the factory default, Photoshop is between a rock and hard place. It knows to display your photo with a gamma of 2.2 because it’s smart. But how should it preview your photo when you choose Save for Web? It has no idea. Will you be viewing your photo in Firefox or Safari? Will you be seeing it with an ICC profile or without? On a Mac or PC? It can’t know.
So by default it plays the odds and takes its chances: you’ll probably end up viewing it on a Mac and since few photos on the web have ICC profiles, it shoots the crap and renders the photo the way your monitor is set, with a gamma of 1.8. Tens of thousands of photographers are tormented by the shift in color they see between an open photo in Photoshop and the save for web preview they see of the same photo right beside it, and they wonder why Photoshop is so wonky.
If you set your monitor to sRGB IEC61966-2.1, that color shift goes away.
What should Steve do?
It seems to me…that artists and photographers want their admirers to see the web the way they intended, which they would if Mac browsers used a gamma of 2.2 for everything on the page.
I worked for Steve’s company in the NeXT days so I can understand the dilemma. High-end publishers standardized on 1.8 gamma before consumers seized the web. But publishers understand words like gamma, ICC profiles, and calibration. Try saying gamma to a consumer. They just want the web to look right.
As it is, companies like Pantone are deciding for Steve to set the gamma at 2.2 with their Hueys. Except sometimes*.
And let’s not forget that Apple already recommends changing the gamma to 2.2 after you buy your Mac.
Why not ship OS X with gamma at 2.2 and say farewell, wonkiness?
UPDATE: The story gets worse. 😦 Turns out the right sRGB profile isn’t included by default on the Mac, so you can’t fix things yourself without some outside help. Photoshop installs it for you automatically, as do some other apps. You can download the right profile here and stick it in /Library/ColorSync/Profiles yourself to fix things up.
Google – Please please please support email aliases!
If anyone from Google is reading this, please, hear my plea!
I, like many people, have more than one email address. One for work, one for home. It’s nice to keep them separate. I’m sure you know what I mean.
I also like to use Google’s services, such as Calendar or Docs. Since I use multiple computers, it’s nice to have stuff centralized out on the net. I’ve wanted this for decades.
But my friends & co-workers don’t always know which email address to send meeting invitations or document permissions to. So I get a Calendar invite or a Docs link, and click on it, and I’m greeted with “Sorry, you don’t have permission to use this.” WTF? I clicked on the unique link in my email, and I’m already logged into Google, what do you mean I don’t have access? Oh, duh, they used my personal email address instead of my work email address. Crap.
So I’m left with two choices: Just not interact with Google on this particular event or document (most likely) or email the party back and ask them to resend (least likely).
Please, Google, let me add email aliases (yes, verify that I actually own them first) to my Google Account so all your services will recognize me from my multiple email addresses. Pretty please? With a cherry on top?
Oh, and it’d be nice if our years-old application to Google Apps for Your Domain was accepted too, but that seems to have gone into the void. Doh.
Server Analysis – Sun victory!
We started evaluating server vendors about two weeks ago, and I’m happy to declare a winner. Sun just got my business and I’m excited to see how they stand up to some hardcore scrutiny once they’re in my datacenters.
Everything’s not 100% rosy, though, so in the interests of being transparent and open, let’s take a look at the Pros and Cons of the Sun sales experience, in rough order of importance to me:
Pros
- They’ve embraced Linux and open-source.
- They’ve embraced x86-64 hardware.
- Lots of Sun employees use SmugMug. They rallied to make sure we were talking to the right people.
- Their CEO blogs, and he blogs in an open and honest way. Yes, this was a key selling point for me.
- They had a perfect platform for us – the X2200 M2 supports twin Opterons with 16 DIMM slots, making it easy and cheap to get 4GB boxes or 32GB boxes and anything in between.
- Production time is measured in days, not weeks or months.
- Their lights-out management sounds awesome on paper. (For the x64 gear. The T1000 didn’t have great LOM, I’m afraid).
- Their engineering rocks. ZFS is drool-worthy, Thumper is a cool piece of hardware, Sun Spots are innovative, and Black Box is just pimp. I’m a geek, what can I say?
- They’re profitable again.
- They’re pushing hard (with some bumps along the way) to give love to startups.
- They’ve been very attentive to us, including:
- Sending a handful of people, including some fairly heavy hitters, out to our “office” the very next day after my initial post.
- Getting their hands dirty trying to understand exactly what our use cases are.
- Agreeing to benchmark and profile some our unusual use cases internally to gather data.
- Sending quotes over in a nice, useable format (PDF)
- Getting aggressive on pricing despite the fact that we’re a small company.
- Keeping in contact with the status of the whole process regularly.
- After publishing a factual, by-the-numbers review of the T1000 that was less than positive, Sun’s reaction was perfect. They didn’t blow up, deny it, or try to cover it up. Instead, they got us more hardware, invited me to their HQ, and put the right people in the room to understand our use case and the numbers we were seeing. This is ongoing, for the curious, and their response was crucial to today’s decision.
- The reverent terms they use to describe their CEO, Jonathan, and the direction and pace he’s setting. Having your employees on board 100% is huge.
- In a prior life, I knew Jonathan briefly and liked him a lot. My father and he worked very closely together through NeXT. Trivia fact of the day: Jonathan’s old company, Lighthouse Design, wrote a game for the NeXT called Void that I absolutely loved. It was a multiplayer LAN game set in space, and it was a blast. Lighthouse was smart enough, though, to put it in the NeXT Software Catalog in the ‘Network Diagnostic’ section so that people could order copies on their company’s dime. True story. (Oh, and as far as I know, Jonathan doesn’t even know we’re investigating Sun. He didn’t grease the wheels or anything to get us a good deal – we’re not unique).
Cons
- The sales process sucks. I don’t mean the sales people – they were great, on-the-ball, and attentive. I’m talking about the internal processes to get approval for things every step of the way. The process would lurch from super-fast “here’s what we need” to super-fast “yes we can get that for you” to molasses-slow “we’re waiting for approval” or “we’re waiting for your Sun ID to come through” and then back to super-fast “let’s fiddle with this detail in the quote” to super-fast “here’s a revised quote”. Large-company-itis got in the way, big time. I needed to have bought this stuff a week earlier, at least, than I actually did. We’re not alone in this particular view.
- Their up-front prices are higher than Rackable’s. I list this merely because it’s worth mentioning. SmugMug is built upon the concept that “you get what you pay for” and I wholeheartedly believe that. Sun got aggressive about pricing for us, and got their prices to be in the same ballpark as Rackable’s, which was great. But they didn’t meet or beat them, so we will end up paying more up-front. TCO remains to be seen, but we hope with higher-quality gear, service, and management, TCO may be lower. Note that I’m just comparing hardware prices here – I’m happy to pay more for better support (2 hour turnaround, for example), but we’re just talking hardware prices here, which you’d think would be similar since the companies all have access to roughly the same components. I’m also not sure how Ning’s math works and ours doesn’t – I guess it’s because he assumed Sun’s servers cost the same as his whitebox servers, which they clearly aren’t for us.
Now, where did the other vendors fall down?
Pros
- HP employees use and love SmugMug. They were very helpful making sure we got the right sales contacts.
- Their lights-out management stuff is fantastic.
Cons
- Didn’t have a platform that fit our needs (16 DIMM slots, 2 CPU sockets). Dang.
- Passed us off to a VAR. I think in my entire career I’ve only seen Value Added Resellers “add value” once. The other hundred or so VARs I’ve dealt with have just been a complete pain.
- A few of our customers let us know that, theoretically, in some world view, Snapfish competes with SmugMug and is owned by HP. I don’t consider Snapfish to be a competitor in almost any sense of the word, and I’m not sure it’d sway my judgement if it was, but I suppose it could have been a tie-breaker if there had been a tie.
Pros
- Easily the fastest on the draw getting quotes to us. One phone call, boom, we had a PDF in our hands. Bonus points for it being PDF.
Cons
- Didn’t pay attention to our actual needs. Quoted 16GB (8x2GB) machines and 32GB (8x4GB) machines, rather than the 32GB (16x2GB) machines we actually needed.
- Turned out not to have a platform that does what we needed.
- Lights-out not built-in to their servers.
Nothing really got off the ground here, so I guess they didn’t really want our business. Made a few calls, but didn’t get much useful back. An employee does love SmugMug, but found out sorta late in the game.
Pros
- Actually has machines that fit our specs. Turned out to be more rare than anticipated – 2 CPU sockets + 16 DIMM slots isn’t as easy to find as I thought.
- Cheap. In every sense of the word.
Cons
- Weeks have gone by with lots of emails and phone calls, and we still have lots of brand-new expensive broken servers. Can you guess why we started looking for someone else in the first place?
- Hardware delivery times are long these days.
- Cheap. In every sense of the word.
So there you have it. I’ll definitely post my thoughts once we’ve had some time to spend with the hardware.
I don't wear manfume. Do you?
Fantastic web marketing. Bruce Campbell is still my hero. Easily the funniest “online test” I’ve ever taken, complete with references to everything from DOOM to Jimmy Wales.
Man, I wish I was smart enough to come up with something this clever.
Steve Jobs on DRM
I love it when CEOs are open, transparent, and specific about their companies and their products. They set the bar for what I’m trying to accomplish on this blog with SmugMug. Customer communication can only improve a company’s ability to deliver good products.
Jonathan Schwartz is a great example of this, and now Steve Jobs is in the game. Not quite a blog, for Jobs, but a super-important letter, anyway.
If you like music, read it.
Not that my opinion matters all that much in the grand scheme of things, but I think he’s 100% on the money, both with his analysis and his conclusion.
Amazon S3: What would you like to know?
As I mentioned in my article about performance issues with S3, I’m speaking on the subject at ETech this year. I’m planning on spending roughly half the time on the business ramifications and half on technical architecture. And I’ll be posting the slides or a PDF or something here after the presentation.
But I’d love some feedback about what you would like me to talk about so you can get the most out of my presentation and/or the information I put up here.
Leave a comment telling me what you’re most interested in about S3 and our implementation and I’ll re-prioritize based on your feedback.
Thanks!
UPDATE: Slides from ETech 2007 are up.
SmugMug's Don MacAskill 
