Having built the system I can probably answer some of those questions.
The cloudfront solution won't work because you need to push from s3 and as we found out during the previous sale that can take up to 20 minutes. That's no fun for anyone, believe me. I'd be pretty reluctant to ever use cloudfront again.
Gae cut you off at 500 rps - they downgrade you back off billing. You can apply to have the limit lifted, which we did but they didn't lift it for us.
There are other things too, like it can be a struggle to update content in a bucket when it's under significant load.
I'm sure everyone looks at the architecture and thinks it's overengineered but we got burned previously and just wanted as much stability and redundancy as possible. It's an interesting problem too, how to survive DDOSing yourself on a monumental scale.
Ultimately we ended up with a stable system at negligible cost and didn't get slated on twitter. That's good enough for me :)
Comments
Having built the system I can probably answer some of those questions.
The cloudfront solution won't work because you need to push from s3 and as we found out during the previous sale that can take up to 20 minutes. That's no fun for anyone, believe me. I'd be pretty reluctant to ever use cloudfront again.
Gae cut you off at 500 rps - they downgrade you back off billing. You can apply to have the limit lifted, which we did but they didn't lift it for us.
There are other things too, like it can be a struggle to update content in a bucket when it's under significant load.
I'm sure everyone looks at the architecture and thinks it's overengineered but we got burned previously and just wanted as much stability and redundancy as possible. It's an interesting problem too, how to survive DDOSing yourself on a monumental scale.
Ultimately we ended up with a stable system at negligible cost and didn't get slated on twitter. That's good enough for me :)