Princeton University
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Computer Science 448
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For your startup, your CEO has asked to evaluate different deployment options for the user-facing web service (if your startup is a mobile app or a hardware company that has no user-facing web component, assume some other company for this writeup). You are considering 1) Linode, 2) Amazon, or 3) buying servers and hosting them at a co-hosted location (like apps4rent.com). For each of these options calculate:For your calculations include your up-front costs and amortize them over 1-year for the minimum cost per month and amortize them over 3-years for the average cost (under heavy load). Keep in mind that for the heavy load scenario, you'll probably need load balancers, multiple front-end web servers, separate database servers, CDN service, etc. Also, you should figure out the requirements on the servers (how much memory you need and why, how much storage you need and why, what type of storage you need, etc) when doing these calculations. For your startup, analyze the key challenges for scalability and figure out how pricing affects that key challenge/bottleneck. For example, Pinterest needs to serve a lot of images and storing and serving millions of images is a key scalability challenge for them. Write a memo to the CEO, listing the different pricing options and an explanation of the key scalability challenges (specific to your startup) and recommend a deployment option that in your view is the best for the startup.
- The minimum cost of deployment per month (the price you'll have to pay if the no. of users on your service is less than 10).
- The average cost under heavy load, say if you get 10 million users. Think about scalability and how pricing will affect you with increase in traffic and users.