Posted on 2009-06-26

Identi.ca the premier instance of the Laconi.ca OpenMicroBlogging platform, attempted to perform an upgrade to 0.8 as a final test before releasing the new version, and the site has been pretty much entirely down since. Attempts to load the site result in errors such as:

"No such site."

"No suitable nodes are available to serve your request."

"Database Error"

Identi.ca's Infrastructure appears to be provided by a "Cloud Accelerator" called Joyent, which seems to be failing pretty spectacularly under what can't really be that extreme a load. The entire idea of hosting in the cloud is that it is elastic, it expands to handle any amount of load, without having the higher fixed costs associated with providing that infrastructure your self, but can that snap back to the smaller size when that increased load goes away, allowing you to only pay for the infrastructure you need, rather than having extra capacity that sits unused. Cloud Computing that simply says "sorry, all of our servers are busy, come back later" would seem to defeat the purpose of hosting in the cloud.

Update 2009-06-26: Identi.ca admits new host is not able to cope with load

By: Allan Jude