From the Garage Lessons Learned Birthing and Building
From the Garage: Lessons Learned Birthing and Building Web Start-ups Mark Fletcher VP & GM, Bloglines at Ask Jeeves March 17, 2005
Garage Philosophy • • Passion for the idea Cheap technologies Keep it simple Release Early/Release Often • Involve your users
Garage Philosophy • • Moonlighting limits risk Friends/Family funds Free services = less pressure Web services APIs are a good thing Hire a lawyer Find good help, especially sys admin Outsource to e. Lance
Architecture 101: Registration-Based Web Sites • Front-End – Web servers – Mail servers • Back-End – User database – Other databases, storage
Software Choices • DBJ (http: //cr. yp. to) – qmail – DJBDNS – Daemontools • Clear. Silver (http: //www. clearsilver. net) • Berkeley DB (http: //www. sleepycat. com)
Software Choices • • • Linux/Apache C/C++/bash/python Skiplist data structure Avoid NFS Avoid table-level locking in My. SQL
Hardware Choices • • Dedicated servers vs. Buying/Hosting Design for cheap hardware e. Bay! APC PDUs for remote power cycling HP Pro. Curve Avoid Seagate Ultra-SCSI drives Good phone for SSH
Architecture Choices • Copying files vs. Client/Server – Bloglines News RSS Feed • Calculate on the fly vs. Cache – Subscriber counts • Memory vs. Disk – Notifications
Storage Choices • Relational DB vs. Flat Files • RAID vs. Redundant – ONElist/e. Groups with hardware RAID – Bloglines without hardware RAID • Linux Software RAID 1
Sys. Admin Choices • DNS round robin for web servers • Hot back-ups for off-line processing • Worry about cooling in the co-lo
Avoid Making Stupid Bets…
Avoid Making Stupid Bets…
Questions?
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