AMA with Barack Obama
It looks like the Obama AMA has really caused some serious fires in reddit's backend infrastructure. The site's been down for the last 10 minutes.<p>I would've thought that they'd have brought in some additional computing power for such an event, should've been easy for them considering they have a cloud deployment. Maybe this gives them greater reason to hire more engineers. I found it impressive that they served billions of impressions with just 2 engineers a short while ago..<p>Also, it says a lot about the "Come Cloud with us, we'll help you scale" marketing bandwagon. We've seen time and again issues with EC2s infrastructure and if EC2 doesn't have issues right now (<a href="http://status.aws.amazon.com/" rel="nofollow">http://status.aws.amazon.com/</a>) then it's just sad that they can't order a gazillion instances for this event and have it scale easily.<p>Definitely makes me think that we still have a long way to go to compute in a truly 'elastic' way.<p>reddit definitely does have some crazy infrastructure in place but this would've been one of the most important moments in reddit history (so far..) and I'm sad to see that their engineers are probably going to get blamed for this..<p>EDIT: Okay, they're back in read only mode.. I wonder how they'll hack in some write access for the AMA while keeping everything else read only. Time for some app server redeployments! Funsies!<p>EDIT2: And they're gone again <i>sigh</i>