Journal m0smithslash's Journal: Weather.com goes open source
[http://www.computerworld.com/developmenttopics/websitemgmt/story/0,10801,92583,00.html]
A Sunny Forecast for Open-Source - Computerworld
Weather.com switched to open-source, saving a boat-load of money while increasing through-put. Support was at least as good as the other guys.
espite the self-serving air of fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) that commercial vendors create around open-source software, lots of open-source products work very well and can be deployed and run for about half the cost of commercial products.
"Literally, in some cases it was orders of magnitude cheaper to go to the Linux boxes," he says. "We replaced machines that were $500,000 with machines that were $50,000."
Weather.com's software developers also found WebSphere to be cumbersome and slow. As a work-around, they frequently developed applications using another tool and then ported them to the WebSphere application server. majority of team members preferred Tomcat, so the group decided to pilot-test the software with a new version of the Web site's local activity page, which dynamically serves up weather data for selected cities. For the test, the team had configured the servers to switch back and forth between WebSphere and Tomcat.
The switch to Tomcat software and Intel-based commodity servers also enables the Web site to add capacity quickly and relatively inexpensively. "In our architecture, which is very flat, scalability comes by buying more machines and throwing more Web servers on them. It's much more cost-justifiable to add 30% more capacity by buying 12 more machines," says Tim Bolser, director of application development. "We don't have to write a check to IBM [for WebSphere licensing fees], and it gives us a lot more flexibility in terms of deploying assets."
"Now when I talk to senior management about moving from Oracle to MySQL they don't ask me, 'Are you sure?'" he says. "They ask me, 'When?'"
A Sunny Forecast for Open-Source - Computerworld
Weather.com switched to open-source, saving a boat-load of money while increasing through-put. Support was at least as good as the other guys.
espite the self-serving air of fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) that commercial vendors create around open-source software, lots of open-source products work very well and can be deployed and run for about half the cost of commercial products.
"Literally, in some cases it was orders of magnitude cheaper to go to the Linux boxes," he says. "We replaced machines that were $500,000 with machines that were $50,000."
Weather.com's software developers also found WebSphere to be cumbersome and slow. As a work-around, they frequently developed applications using another tool and then ported them to the WebSphere application server. majority of team members preferred Tomcat, so the group decided to pilot-test the software with a new version of the Web site's local activity page, which dynamically serves up weather data for selected cities. For the test, the team had configured the servers to switch back and forth between WebSphere and Tomcat.
The switch to Tomcat software and Intel-based commodity servers also enables the Web site to add capacity quickly and relatively inexpensively. "In our architecture, which is very flat, scalability comes by buying more machines and throwing more Web servers on them. It's much more cost-justifiable to add 30% more capacity by buying 12 more machines," says Tim Bolser, director of application development. "We don't have to write a check to IBM [for WebSphere licensing fees], and it gives us a lot more flexibility in terms of deploying assets."
"Now when I talk to senior management about moving from Oracle to MySQL they don't ask me, 'Are you sure?'" he says. "They ask me, 'When?'"
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Weather.com goes open source
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