i wonder whether a service like twitter could be implemented and run with sufficient scalability on top of google app engine?
GAE is still in beta and they have resource usage quotas in place, but assuming these can be adjusted (for $) the question becomes one of scalability of the datastore and perhaps the google apps user account subsystem (if that's where you decide to put user accounts.)
A separate question obviously would be the relationship with the google advertising platform and user privacy.
just an idea to chew on...
j
Twitter has received $15 million in venture funding, according to Om Malik. Now the fun really begins: Twitter needs to change its architecture on the fly.
Om reports that the latest round means that Twitter has raised about $20 million in total VC backing.
With that newfound dough it’s pretty obvious what Twitter needs to do: Build out and revamp its architecture so it can scale up. And oh by the way Twitter has to make these changes on the fly. To me, Twitter has become an IT infrastructure story. Twitter has a big following, but if it can’t scale it’s doomed.
Twitter’s challenge is the equivalent of open heart surgery going at 100 miles per hour. How bad is it? It’s pretty bad.
In a nutshell that graph should be flat if Twitter was operating properly. Obviously, Twitter isn’t. The company explains:
We’ve gone through our various databases, caches, web servers, daemons, and despite some increased traffic activity across the board, all systems are running nominally. The truth is we’re not sure what’s happening. It seems to be occurring in-between these parts.
We’re busy working on instrumenting and adding meters to provide visibility into what’s slowing Twitter down. We’ll use this data both to alleviate the current woes and to help inform our long-term architecture work to make Twitter a utility service people can count on. We’ve definitely failed that aim this week.
Here’s to hoping that an extra $15 million can help Twitter figure it out.
Also see: Ruby on Rails expert: Rails scales; Twitter shouldn’t taint Ruby
