How Amazon puts Linux to the test

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re: a bit more, from an x-insider

While I have never worked at Amazon, I did live in Seattle for 6 years and was part of the tech scene there. I've heard the various stories of just how unimpressive the code that constitutes Amazon's OBIDOS application is (note "OBIDOS" in Amazon's URLs when looking at their products). In fact, the OBIDOA application is gargantuan. The resulting binary image when linked is 1 gigabyte and takes quite a while to link I have been told.

I think entropy is at work there in a major way with respect to that specific application.

I hear you on the leveraging of common programming patterns however some things "happen by accident" and I think Amazon on account of being first was mostly an accident. You know what they say, genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. The 1% was the idea of selling books online, the 99% is Amazon's ecommerce platform (if you happen to be working on that code).

LINUX was and remains a strong value proposition for companies that have LARGE web farms. Not only is the licensing non-existent (since LINUX is free) total cost of ownership in a large server farm is better with *NIX. MS lovers can argue what they may but having worked on both sides of the fence I like the fact that I can connect to any machine I need to with pseudo-terminal services (SSH) and do whatever needs doing.

In addition there are well established practices of configuration management that make total cost of ownership with respect to LARGE server farms better for *NIX (e.g., Google has 10,000 LINUX servers). *NIX systems also tend to be driven by plain jane text configuration files lending to this practice.

Both of these points are annoying on Windows - the lack of integrated out of the box pseudo-terminal services as well as registry hell. Yeah, someone will bring up Microsoft's Terminal Services, but I got news for you, they aren't free merely adding that much more to the pricey cost of Windows when you're talking about hundreds or even THOUSANDS of machines to serve a very large audience like Amazon and Google.

Posted by: betelgeuse68   Posted on: 01/22/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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