Another Amazon EC2 story

Looks like HotPads.com has abandoned traditional hosting and moved into Amazon’s elastic compute cloud (EC2). This is a trend that I’ve been following in the web space.

The site has 4.5 million page views / month, alexa ranking of 28,284 (as a reference, craigslist is ranked 24; cisco 1,316; networkworld 10,191; lightreading 40,210)

The current hosting spend for Amazon during the month of April was $10k: 71.37% in computing (20+ server instances + load balancing), 14.47% in storage. One would expect this number to trend upwards as the traffic usage increases which dictates more compute instances to be added.

Note in the presentation the focus is on the efficiency of the application itself (latency, availability, scaling). 8GB of dedicated Memcached servers to improve app-to-db performance. All of these are conversation topics for Cisco UCS, specifically on its unique memory architecture and management / operational practices around stateless servers.