Terminus1066 wrote:
sevion wrote:
Zaero wrote:
silverfoxdmt73 wrote:
Pete17331 wrote:
IT guy here. Yes, it is perfectly possible to prepare for this kind of workload. For example, companies like EA Sports does it every time they get ready to release a new game. They outsource and get enough temporary processing power (in the cloud) to handle the predicted workload.
I imagine companies like EA Sports have more than 50 staff across their IT department, never mind the whole company and a few $billion to throw at outsourcing IT.
Fellow IT guy here. You can scale, sure, but if you don't have the hardware or the ability to invest, that scalability doesn't amount to a hill of beans.
EA has (I would argue) a far bigger resource pool to work with. But hey, obviously everyone has infinite servers to deploy at any time.
Thats why for a company like this they should be using Amazon WS. Sure owning hardware is cheaper in the long run but now instead of letting the service spawn a few more servers for you or you do it yourself they now have angry customers who may or may not have been future clients at full price or monthly subscribers to other services offered.
Agreed - building an infrastructure that doesn't scale may be easier in the short term, but eventually it's going to bite you in the ass, which is what has happened here.
It's all dependent on need. Sure it's easy to say "just use X" or "get more servers", but you ain't running the company. It may make more sense for them to host in house. You don't know that.
Playing Backseat Architect doesn't quite work. I mean, even Steam tips over when a new sale starts, and they're MASSIVE. No online service is perfectly scalable to meet demand. Yea, people are mad they can';t get their books NOW, but it's not like Paizo's going to run out of copies. This ain't TVs on Black Friday.
I'm being patient. Would I like my books now? Sure. But I'd also like a giant novelty check made out to me in an ungodly sum hand delivered by Scarlett Johansson. I'm still waiting on that check.
