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My team and I would like to develop a project that incorporates an Android, iOS and web app. Scalability and big throughput potential is a key feature. We have started to work with Parse.com, and it provides exactly what we're looking for - except for the prohibitive expensiveness of scaling and the absurd limits on queries and requests/second. What are some alternatives to Parse in this sense? We most likely do not need any complex database actions and limited cloud processing.
Thanks in advance.
Perhaps it's time us Parse users go to the big boy of cloud services: https://aws.amazon.com/mobile/
Parse is an outstanding option for getting up and running quickly. Don't underestimate the value in being able to rapidly bring an idea to market.
Long term, potential competitors to Parse (e.g. Firebase, PubNub) will not provide meaningful savings when operating at scale. If you are concerned about that you will want to look into developing your own backend services and running them on infrastructure like AWS (Amazon Web Services). At a high level, Parse uses MongoDB for its core database and is entirely hosted using AWS. AWS offers tons of services for managing data, performing computations, load balancing, and so on. They also offer AWS API Gateway which allows you to access AWS resources and automatically creates client SDKs for you.
As a general rule of thumb, it's much better to focus on building the best possible user experience than to focus too much on scalability. By and large, issues of scalability rarely come into play because most apps fail. Not saying that to be discouraging — just something to keep in mind and prevent you from falling into the trap of over-engineering at the cost of time :)
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I have a total of 5 Play applications that I have been working on my spare time. They are small projects, serious enough to be published to the world yet not enough to invest large sums of money. I would anticipate a maximum of 10k visits per month, they are read only (information comes out of a database, nothing comes in).
What are some good inexpensive options to deploy these 5 websites? They will have 5 different domain names.
Thanks,
You'll need to pay for the 5 domains regardless of the option.
Note: I can only speak for GAE, I have no experience with AWS.
In GAE you might be able to stay within the free quotas:
https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas
Free quotas are higher for a paid account which might be overall more cost-effective than a non-paid account.
If the apps share the DB (not directly possible in GAE at this time, see is it possible to share a datastore between multiple GAE applications and maybe related Q&As) I'd recommend making them just modules of a single app instead of separate apps. All domains would be mapped to that single app and routed to separate modules using a dispatch file.
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I have a few ideas for mobile applications, some of which could benefit from some cloud functionality.
For example, an application might allow a user to take photographs with their phone which would generate a list of thumbnails, imagine a to-do list which comprises photographs rather than the traditional text entries.
With the help of the cloud, the user could sync the thumbnails on multiple devices, or perhaps give access to the list to another person using a push notification to their phone, allowing them to then download the thumbnails. There may also be a cloud-based database being used.
It's a simple scenario but it raises some questions for me.
Most mobile apps are currently either free (maybe monetised with ads) or have an initial one-off cost, yet ongoing cloud services cost money. If I developed an app that had 1,000,000 users all storing photos in the cloud and they use the app for the next ten years then the cloud costs could be substantial yet income from app sales may be low after the initial influx of users.
So how do other developers manage ongoing cloud costs?
Are most apps that make use of the cloud subscription based?
Can someone who has already done this type of thing share their experience regarding cloud costs and app monetisation?
Cloud storage is pretty cheap so you could go the Apple way and allow free use up to a certain storage limit and then charge for extra space. Another way is to actually store images offline on a local server and then copy back as required. Since these images are only accessible via your app you can send a message to your online server when it looks like an image is about to be required - pre load from your local server and then delete again after some time period. You may need some extra management code but if you know how many devices are registered and whether they all have a copy of the image then there is no need for the image to be available online.
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We prefer to use web based apps with jquery.mobile as they can get upgraded on demand and just less hassle. Is there an api that can be called by ajax from our web based app to use the card.io service?
I'm afraid not. To make for a responsive, reliable user experience, card.io actually examines many video frames to select good quality ones for processing. We also process them client-side, because with large images the latency from the network round trip can be significant.
This all requires non-trivial client-side work. There are two immediate problems to porting to html: (1) performance and (2) camera APIs.
Performance
Javascript interpreters are fast, but when doing image processing, native code is a huge help. (card.io uses the GPU, the ARM vector co-processor, and drops down to assembly in a few places.) Access to the GPU via Canvas will help, but not all algorithms are amenable to GPU treatment. Performance will continue to become less critical over time, but it's a major challenge right now.
Camera APIs
Camera API support is very uneven across mobile browsers, and (to my knowledge, at time of writing), none of the major mobile browsers (Mobile Safari, Chrome, Firefox) provide full realtime video access with enough control over resolution to make processing the stream feasible. Again, hopefully this will change.
I hold out hope that there will someday be a mobile web version of card.io, but it's definitely not available now (although we do have a Phone Gap plugin.)
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Hej,
I recently read a lot of papers from Lamport, Fischer, Lynch, Brewer to get a feeling for their perspective of distributed systems.
I was wondering, what are current open distributed computing research questions/topics? Many areas from databases, communication, fault-tolerance, number crunching, etc. seem to be tackled and in quite solid hands.
What do you think are new areas, maybe someone did think of in the past but rendered it impossible and now it becomes possible? A topic like graph algorithms/databases/analysis?
I would also appreciate if anyone can give a some hints of must-read papers about distributed systems. They can also be a more "sci-fi" to just stay inspired.
Something I have had a big interest in is the potential for using cloud computing / distributed systems to run 3D software, such as you could set up essentially a virtual production studio "in the cloud", as it stands now the cloud providers offer only very basic rudimentary graphics support as their hardware is not equipped with anything approaching high end graphics cards..
I think in the future this type of platform could be also used for online games and things of that nature, such as to take away the need for local computing power, with the increase in broadband speeds (some places in the U.S. now have access to fiberoptic lines with 50+ MB per second) this is becoming an increasing possibility in the near future.
I don't play computer games myself and just used to do some 3D design / animation work but I look at it more from a business perspective and think that this has a lot of potential as, for example, someone with just a basic notebook laptop could eventually be able to use a remote connection to a distributed computing network to play a CPU intensive game (likely through a subscription based set up as this obviously would be taxing on the company providing such a game service as they would be providing all the computing power).
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I'm going to deploy my application on one of them,
and have no idea which is better.
Amazon's Cloud services, at this time, are much more general and flexible, while Google App Engine essentially fits some specific classes of applications that can live within its specific limitations (those limitations are being gradually relaxed, as GAE adds features and allows you to pay to exceed certain quotas, but that does not mean GAE will become a completely general-purpose platform the way Amazon's services are).
If your app can live within GAE's limitations, then GAE presents advantages: free up to a certain quota, almost no system configuration / administration overhead, etc. But if you need total flexibility -- for example, if you want to code part of your apps in C or C++, and that's just one of many examples -- then GAE is not suitable, while Amazon (for a price, in both money and sysadm overhead) can accomodate you.
If you've already written your app, and just want to deploy it, I'd have to say AWS is your best bet. AWS is a platform (or rather, EC2 is), and deploying an existing app is easy. App Engine, on the other hand, provides an entire development environment, at a much higher level of abstraction, which has significant advantages when it comes to scaling, but requires you to have written your app to work on it.
Now how about Free Amazon EC2 for a year to do a better comparision. Check this out.
http://www.buzzingup.com/2010/10/amazon-announces-free-cloud-services-for-new-developers/
No one is king in this field because both amazon and google have their own pros and cons. for the finally decision you have to study deep about both or you have to analyze what you required for you apps.
no doubt aws is old in this field and they have lot of good quality stuff but remember google is fast growing in cloud computing.
personally aws is easy to use and training and support is easily available on the other side google is his early stage and bit complex interface for newbie
so you can learn from you requirement