Eric’s Home on the Web

We are wrapping up a successful security week at Yahoo tomorrow. It was an interesting conference with lots of viewpoints presented.

Good quote I read at Yahoo.

So Google released their new AppEngine yesterday a few days ago. Of course, all Technical Yahoos have to check out what the folks down the street are working on. I didn’t take a look at things too closely, but my big question is “OK? what’s the big deal?” So, you can now run code you developed on Google’s hardware in their datacenter on top of BigTable. Would you want to do that?

Second point: is every new web 2.0 project going to need to scale from 0 to millions of page views instantly? Who has that EVER happened to? Digg, Facebook and the other web 2.0 startups run their own serving stack on their own hardware. Sure, they had to endure growing pains, but so did every growing company — including Google.

“Infrastructure for infrastructure’s sake” is cool for the geeks out there wanting to play with some of what google uses behind the scenes (although highly abstracted). But, that’s all I can see the use for. If you are a startup, I would recommend: build a cool product on your own serving stack. Build it right from the beginning with scalability in mind, and then grow your business.

Some of you may wonder what I really do at Yahoo since I joined in Sept 2007. Well, here is the brief description. I work in the Core Software Infrastructure Group at Yahoo. We are basically the people who provide the standard Yahoo LAMP serving stack, minus the L (which is another team,entirely). So maybe, you can consider us the AMP [Apache, MySQL and PHP] along with a few other core components that no one ever sees :/ The executive summary is that I don’t touch any user facing code; rather, I handle the software that talks from your web browser to our servers. It’s behind the scenes code that (among other software) makes Y! so fast and flexible.