At first sight, this seems awesome. I've been looking for something like this for a while. However, The homepage seems to be a little sparse in terms of specifics. Before implementing this as a core part of a product, I'd like to know:
- Pricing model?
- Seems free for now, but how about when it's out of beta? How are you going to ensure you stay alive without making me go out of business?
- How does this work? "Magic scalability" is mentioned, which sets a red flag for me. We process >1B requests a month (and growing), and we've found that even the best tools have to be used carefully. Black box software such as this is very scary.
- How is this deployed? Is it on EC2, which would mean low latency between our infrastructure and the bridge servers? Is there an installable version for people who aren't on EC2? Seems to be a requirement, since message / queues and internal apis require low latency to process things quickly. Especially if we're basing our entire internal service-oriented architecture on top of it.
I want to love this, but there's a lot of unanswered questions, at least from perusing this site. I've learnt the hard way to not believe in magic.
When it's out of beta, there will be a free tier on Flotype Bridge Public Cloud, and a few paid tiers for people that would like us to manage the Bridge server. This is meant for smaller applications.
We can handle 1-2 billion messages/day on a single 8-core server. "Magic scalability" refers to the concept of Bridge Services[1]. If you write code to publish a Bridge Service, you can magically scale by simply firing up more instances of that code. You'll read more about this in the docs.
This can be deployed anywhere - EC2, Rackspace, or your private datacenter/cloud, whatever! We just need to make kernel/OS level optimizations for each stack. The Flotype Bridge Cloud runs on EC2, but you can buy and run Bridge anywhere you want.
Yes, there is an installable version. The goal of Bridge is to build a messaging system for products with very large messaging needs (billions of messages/hour or more). (This is just a beta). For such applications, subsystem latency is crucial, so the primary deployment model is for you to install it next to your application servers.
Please email me at darshan @ flotype.com if you have any more questions :)
- Pricing model?
- Seems free for now, but how about when it's out of beta? How are you going to ensure you stay alive without making me go out of business?
- How does this work? "Magic scalability" is mentioned, which sets a red flag for me. We process >1B requests a month (and growing), and we've found that even the best tools have to be used carefully. Black box software such as this is very scary.
- How is this deployed? Is it on EC2, which would mean low latency between our infrastructure and the bridge servers? Is there an installable version for people who aren't on EC2? Seems to be a requirement, since message / queues and internal apis require low latency to process things quickly. Especially if we're basing our entire internal service-oriented architecture on top of it.
I want to love this, but there's a lot of unanswered questions, at least from perusing this site. I've learnt the hard way to not believe in magic.