Fanzter

I know that many folks are curious for more information about what we’re doing with Coolspotters. Sadly (for them), I’m not blogging to write about “what” we’re doing so much as to write about “how” we’re doing what we do here at Coolspotters. I hope to make that, and a general outlook on technology in the consumer Internet world, a bigger part of this blog.

For those of you absolutely dying to know more about Coolspotters, the only thing I’ll say right now is that you won’t be waiting much longer. We have a launch date internally and are rapidly iterating toward it. We’ve let some very special folks in to see it, and are quickly incorporating feedback while also squashing bugs and tuning up the application. Lots to do still, but it wouldn’t be a startup if we had all the time we needed. :)

That’s all I’ve got for Fanzter news, at least on the “what are you doing” side of things.

On the “how” side, though, I’ve been spending a lot of time worrying about our production setup and our scaling path from our relatively small footprint right now to a site that will be bigger and better in the future. We’re currently using Amazon’s EC2 service as our virtualization and hosting platform, and Ruby on Rails as our development platform.

Two recent announcements, one by Amazon and the other by Google, have gotten me pretty excited. For those of you starting companies, this is a great time to be out there doing this, because platforms are becoming services that are affordable on even the smallest budgets.

Amazon has been the most well known of the elastic/grid providers, but Google joined in by launching their application hosting platform called Google App Engine. There are some key differences with Amazon’s EC2, but I don’t want to go into a feature-by-feature comparison. For a quick rundown I recommend checking out this blog post at ZDNet.

The most interesting thing about Google’s offering is that it goes right at the key weakness of Amazon’s EC2. For example, on the hardware platform side, EC2 doesn’t provide some fairly basic functions like load balancing and request routing as prepackaged functions or services. You have to set up a Linux instance to run as a load balancer manually, worry about failover manually, and deal with spinning up new instances manually. To be fair, third party services are filling in this gap, but they represent an additional cost over the base EC2 platform.

Google’s App Engine, on the other hand, constrains developers to a certain set of technologies, but then offers horizontal scaling pretty much as a core feature of the platform. Play by their rules and using their tools, and they’ll help you deal with whatever success you have.

For us, of course, Google App Engine isn’t a possibility yet. We’re proudly using Ruby on Rails to power Coolspotters, and Rails isn’t supported yet.

Amazon hasn’t been standing still, either. They addressed one of our bigger concerns last month by releasing Elastic IP addresses. I’m also excited for the future after Amazon announced what they’re currently calling persistent storage volumes. These two items are at the top of our wish list of features and I’m excited that Amazon has found a way to implement these in a scalable and flexible way.

We’re taking advantage of all of these features in Coolspotters. I’m looking forward to getting into more detail over the coming weeks, especially as we roll out Coolspotters and get some real user traffic on our infrastructure.

For now, we’re looking forward to launching soon and getting our hard work in front of everyone. Very Soon Now, promise. :-)

Sujal

Sujal Shah
VP, Technology
sujal@fanzter.com