[erlang-questions] Lets build a stock exchange!

[G Bulmer]

Oh, okay. I am sorry to seem a bit slow.
Summary:
- You want something interesting enough to induce a bunch of us to  
run EC2 instances in order to test a humongous Erlang+EC2 cluster.
- It has to be interesting to you so that you get it done.
- It does *not* need to be production quality.

> On Nov 15, 2007, at 12:55 PM, G Bulmer wrote:
>>>> (I realise your focus
>>>> is a book, but wouldn't you like millions of people to use the
>>>> software?).
>
> No, I wouldn't. The software I will create for the book is just  
> educational software. I will use this software to demonstrate  
> Erlang features and to try to build a huge EC2 cluster.
...
> I will likely develop the software for millions of people to use  
> after I write the book. .... There's not enough time or pages in  
> the book to accomplish such a feat.
Okay, I understand, and can agree that designing and building a  
usable stock exchange, at the same time as writing a book, may be too  
much work in the time window available.

>>> Further, I am not sure how low the latency will be; I can't ping  
>>> amazon, but when I ping google I get round-trip averages over 50  
>>> mSec
>
> I think latency here is the delay introduced by the software  
> itself, not the delay introduced by the internet.
Well, Amdahl's law says the largest component of performance  
dominates optimisations ...
So, is your plan to run the whole thing within EC2?

>
>> My problem is I don't see why *I* would run a stock exchange  
>> application, so I don't see why *I* would run Amazon EC2 instances.
>
> You don't need to run a stock exchange application. You may want to  
> add your instance to the cluster to take part in the Erlang  
> scalability test.
Ah, ha! I think I've got it!

>> ...
> .... May I suggest that you take up a parallel effort and describe  
> how to build auctions on EC2 in a series of blog posts? The  
> software you develop will be commercially viable and useful to you.  
> It will serve as additional proof of viability of Erlang on EC2.
I am not passionate about auctions, it just seemed more likely that  
people would use it, and hence it'd get a large number of instances  
being 'thrashed' by live traffic. I now understand that is a 'non- 
goal'. You only need something big for a 'cluster-fest'.

Maybe I will wait for the extremely-large-scale Erlang+EC2 cluster  
issues to be solved.
That I am interested in!

Good luck
G Bulmer