Scaling Powerset using Amazon's EC2 and S3
The first thing most doc-com companies do before going public is setup an infrastructure to provide the service. And though it might sound straight forward to most of you, it can be a very expensive affair. To come up with the right kind of infrastructure for any new service a few key architectural decisions have to be made. Design the infrastructure and architecture to handle the traffic peaks (not average) Design with long term scaling in mind Design power and cooling infrastructure to support the servers Hire Hardware+Systems+network support staff ( more if 24/7 operations are required) Add buffers to support failures and short term grow requirements Take into account lead times of ordering and procuring hardware (which can be weeks if not months).. And a few others.. which I won't bore you with here. The point is that the initial capital investment can be in millions even before the first customer starts using the service. And once the capital investment is made,