Don MacAskill

Don MacAskell's Blog Everyone knows that SmugMug is a heavy user of S3, storing well over half a petabyte of data (non-replicated) there. What you may not know is that EC2 provides a core part of our infrastructure, too. Thanks to Amazon, the software and hardware that processes all of your high-resolution photos and high-definition video is totally scalable without any human intervention. And when I say scalable, I mean both up and down, just the way it should be. Here's our approach in a nutshell... Overview The architecture basically consists of three software components: the rendering workers, the batch queuing piece, and the controller. The rendering workers live on EC2, and both the queuing piece and the controller live at SmugMug. We don’t use SQS for our queuing mechanism for a few reasons: We’d already built a queuing mechanism years ago, and it hasn’t (yet?... (more)