Sponsored Post: Torbit, Infragistics, Velocity, Reality Check Network, Gigaspaces, AiCache, Logic Monitor, Attribution Modeling, New Relic, AppDynamics, CloudSigma, ManageEnine, Site24x7

Who's Hiring? 

• Torbit is hiring! Care about performance? Care about making the internet faster and better? At Torbit we use lots of Golong, Node.js, JavaScript and PHP to solve big challenges.

Fun and Informative Events

• The DevOps PaaS Infusion Meetup NYC - Taking Mission-Critical Apps to the Cloud. You’ll hear real world use cases from Microsoft, Aditi, Cisco, GigaSpaces, and C24. Register here:  http://bit.ly/IpgpaN. 
• O'Reilly Velocity, the Web Performance and Operations conference, is happening in Santa Clara, CA from June 25-27. Learn from your peers, exchange ideas with experts, and share best practices and lessons learned. Register here.
• Sign up for this free 30-minute webinar exploring how new technology can determine which ads have been seen by users and will discuss the C3 Metrics Labs analysis of over 2 billion impressions. 

Cool Products and Services

• Reality Check Network offers powerful hosting solutions and managed servers for high traffic/bandwidth websites backed by unlimited network, server and application support.
• When you’re looking for the fastest, lightest, most complete toolset for rapidly building high performance Web 2.0 applications, you want NetAdvantage for ASP.NET.
• Create your most stunning, highly performant, and completely mobile HTML5 applications and dashboards on any browser, platform or device – only with NetAdvantage for jQuery.
• aiCache creates a better user experience by increasing the speed scale and stability of your web-site. Test aiCache acceleration for free.  No sign-up required. http://aicache.com/deploy
• LogicMonitor - Hosted monitoring of your entire technology stack. Dashboards, trending graphs, alerting. Try it free and be up and running in just 15 minutes.
• New Relic - real user monitoring optimize for humans, not bots. Live application stats, SQL/NoSQL performance, web transactions, proactive notifications. Take 2 minutes to sign up for a free trial.
• AppDynamics is the very first free product designed for troubleshooting Java performance while getting full visibility in production environments. Visit http://www.appdynamics.com/free.
• CloudSigma. Utility style high performance cloud servers in the US and Europe delivered on all 10GigE networking. Run any OS, take advantage of SSD storage and tailored infrastructure options.
• ManageEngine Applications Manager : Monitor physical, virtual and Cloud Applications.
• www.site24x7.com : Monitor End User Experience from a global monitoring network.

For a longer description of each sponsor, please read more below...

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Pinterest Architecture Update - 18 Million Visitors, 10x Growth,12 Employees, 410 TB of Data

There has been an update on Pinterest: Pinterest growth driven by Amazon cloud scalability since our last post: A Short on the Pinterest Stack for Handling 3+ Million Users.

With Pinterest we see a story very similar to that of Instagram. Huge growth, lots of users, lots of data, with remarkably few employees, all on the cloud.

While it's true that both Pinterest and Instagram are not making great advances in science and technology, that is more indicator of the easy power of today's commodity environments rather than a sign of Silicon Valley's lack of innovation. The numbers are so huge and the valuations are so high we naturally want some sort of fundamental technological revolution to underlie their growth. The revolution is more subtle. It really is just that easy to attain such growth these days, if you can execute on the right idea. Get used to it. This is the new normal.

Here's what Pinterest looks like today: 

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Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For May 18, 2012

It's HighScalability Time:

• 42 Billion: Netflix API Requests/Month
• Quotable quotes:
  • @commonlisp: Ideas from the talk: In Haskell laziness + thunks + garbage collection (GC) impede multicore scalability. Parallel GC is crucial.
  • @Bulldozer0: Global state is the enemy of scalability; not only in software, but in governance.
• If you've ever, as I have, felt the terror of a misplaced "rm -rf /", you'll love this story: Did Pixar accidentally delete Toy Story 2 during production? It did, the reconstruction was heroic, and parts of Toy Story 2 were lost forever.

Don't miss all that the Internet has to say on Scalability, click below and become eventually consistent with all scalability knowledge...

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Big List of 20 Common Bottlenecks

In Zen And The Art Of Scaling - A Koan And Epigram Approach, Russell Sullivan offered an interesting conjecture: there are 20 classic bottlenecks. This sounds suspiciously like the idea that there only 20 basic story plots. And depending on how you chunkify things, it may be true, but in practice we all know bottlenecks come in infinite flavors, all tasting of sour and ash.

One day Aurelien Broszniowski from Terracotta emailed me his list of bottlenecks, we cc’ed Russell in on the conversation, he gave me his list, I have a list, and here’s the resulting stone soup.

Russell said this is his “I wish I knew when I was younger" list and I think that’s an enriching way to look at it. The more experience you have, the more different types of projects you tackle, the more lessons you’ll be able add to a list like this. So when you read this list, and when you make your own, you are stepping through years of accumulated experience and more than a little frustration, but in each there is a story worth grokking.

• Database:

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DynamoDB Talk Notes and the SSD Hot S3 Cold Pattern

My impression of DynamoDB before attending a Amazon DynamoDB for Developers talk is that it’s the usual quality service produced by Amazon: simple, fast, scalable, geographically redundant, expensive enough to make you think twice about using it, and delightfully NoOp.

After the talk my impression has become more nuanced. The quality impression still stands. Look at the forums and you’ll see the typical issues every product has, but no real surprises. And as a SimpleDB++, DynamoDB seems to have avoided second system syndrome and produced a more elegant design.

What was surprising is how un-cloudy DynamoDB appears to be. The cloud pillars of pay for what you use and quick elastic response to bursty traffic have been abandoned, for some understandable reasons, but the result is you really have to consider your use cases before making DynamoDB the default choice.

Here are some of my impressions from the talk...

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Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For May 11, 2012

It's HighScalability Time:

• 2.5M : Erlang Concurrent Connections; 20 Billion : Urban Airship Push Notifications. 
• @agentdero: "You go to production with the code you have, not the code you wish you had" - Devops Rumsfeld
• @PatrickMcFadin: After talking to a lot of big #aws customers tonight, the big non-secret is we'll be seeing #ssd instances soon.
• Goodbye, CouchDB. Steven Hazel shares his experience report with CouchDB. Like many relationships it all started great, but reliability, performance, and maintenance problems drove him into the arms of Percona MySQL. They use MySQL in NoSQL mode and in return they get better performance and a love that never fails.

Don't miss all that the Internet has to say on Scalability, click below and become eventually consistent with all scalability knowledge...

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Paper: Paxos Made Moderately Complex

If you are a normal human being and find the Paxos protocol confusing, then this paper, Paxos Made Moderately Complex, is a great find. Robbert van Renesse from Cornell University has written a clear and well written paper with excellent explanations.

The Abstract:

For anybody who has ever tried to implement it, Paxos is by no means a simple protocol, even though it is based on relatively simple invariants. This paper provides imperative pseudo-code for the full Paxos (or Multi-Paxos) protocol without shying away from discussing various implementation details. The initial description avoids optimizations that complicate comprehension. Next we discuss liveness, and list various optimizations that make the protocol practical.

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Cell Architectures

A consequence of Service Oriented Architectures is the burning need to provide services at scale. The architecture that has evolved to satisfy these requirements is a little known technique called the Cell Architecture.

A Cell Architecture is based on the idea that massive scale requires parallelization and parallelization requires components be isolated from each other. These islands of isolation are called cells. A cell is a self-contained installation that can satisfy all the operations for a shard. A shard is a subset of a much larger dataset, typically a range of users, for example. 

Cell Architectures have several advantages:

• Cells provide a unit of parallelization that can be adjusted to any size as the user base grows.
• Cell are added in an incremental fashion as more capacity is required.
• Cells isolate failures. One cell failure does not impact other cells.
• Cells provide isolation as the storage and application horsepower to process requests is independent of other cells.
• Cells enable nice capabilities like the ability to test upgrades, implement rolling upgrades, and test different versions of software.
• Cells can fail, be upgraded, and distributed across datacenters independent of other cells.

A number of startups make use of Cell Architectures:

• Tumblr: Users are mapped into cells and many cells exist per data center. Each cell has an HBase cluster, service cluster, and Redis caching cluster. Users are homed to a cell and all cells consume all posts via firehose updates. Background tasks consume from the firehose to populate tables and process requests. Each cell stores a single copy of all posts.
• Flickr: Uses a federated approach where all a user’s data is stored on a shard which is a cluster of different services.
• Facebook: The Messages service has as the basic building block of their system a cluster of machines and services called a cell. A cell consists of ZooKeeper controllers, an application server cluster, and a metadata store.
• Salesforce: Salesforce is architected in terms of pods. Pods are self-contained sets of functionality consisting of 50 nodes, Oracle RAC servers, and Java application servers. Each pod supports many thousands of customers. If a pod fails only the users on that pod are impacted.

The key to the cell is you are creating a scalable and robust MTBF friendly service. A service than can be used as a bedrock component in a system of other services coordinated by a programmable orchestration layer. It works just as well in a data center as in a cloud. If you are looking for a higher level organization pattern, the Cell Architecture is a solid choice.

Related Articles

• Startups Are Creating A New System Of The World For IT

Sponsored Post: Infragistics, Velocity, Reality Check Network, Gigaspaces, AiCache, ElasticHosts, Logic Monitor, Attribution Modeling, New Relic, AppDynamics, CloudSigma, ManageEnine, Site24x7

Who's Hiring? 

• Are you looking for good people?

Fun and Informative Events

• The DevOps PaaS Infusion Meetup NYC - Taking Mission-Critical Apps to the Cloud. You’ll hear real world use cases from Microsoft, Aditi, Cisco, GigaSpaces, and C24. Register here:  http://bit.ly/IpgpaN. 
• O'Reilly Velocity, the Web Performance and Operations conference, is happening in Santa Clara, CA from June 25-27. Learn from your peers, exchange ideas with experts, and share best practices and lessons learned. Register here.
• Sign up for this free 30-minute webinar exploring how new technology can determine which ads have been seen by users and will discuss the C3 Metrics Labs analysis of over 2 billion impressions. 

Cool Products and Services

• Reality Check Network offers powerful hosting solutions and managed servers for high traffic/bandwidth websites backed by unlimited network, server and application support.
• When you’re looking for the fastest, lightest, most complete toolset for rapidly building high performance Web 2.0 applications, you want NetAdvantage for ASP.NET.
• Create your most stunning, highly performant, and completely mobile HTML5 applications and dashboards on any browser, platform or device – only with NetAdvantage for jQuery.
• aiCache creates a better user experience by increasing the speed scale and stability of your web-site. Test aiCache acceleration for free.  No sign-up required. http://aicache.com/deploy
• ElasticHosts award winning cloud server hosting launches across North America. Adding data centers in Los Angeles and Toronto. Free trial.
• LogicMonitor - Hosted monitoring of your entire technology stack. Dashboards, trending graphs, alerting. Try it free and be up and running in just 15 minutes.
• New Relic - real user monitoring optimize for humans, not bots. Live application stats, SQL/NoSQL performance, web transactions, proactive notifications. Take 2 minutes to sign up for a free trial.
• AppDynamics is the very first free product designed for troubleshooting Java performance while getting full visibility in production environments. Visit http://www.appdynamics.com/free.
• CloudSigma. Utility style high performance cloud servers in the US and Europe delivered on all 10GigE networking. Run any OS, take advantage of SSD storage and tailored infrastructure options.
• ManageEngine Applications Manager : Monitor physical, virtual and Cloud Applications.
• www.site24x7.com : Monitor End User Experience from a global monitoring network.

For a longer description of each sponsor, please read more below...

Click to read more ...

Startups are Creating a New System of the World for IT

It remains that, from the same principles, I now demonstrate the frame of the System of the World. -- Isaac Newton

The practice of IT reminds me a lot of the practice of science before Isaac Newton. Aristotelianism was dead, but there was nothing to replace it. Then Newton came along, created a scientific revolution with his System of the World. And everything changed. That was New System of the World number one.

New System of the World number two was written about by the incomparable Neal Stephenson in his incredible Baroque Cycle series. It explores the singular creation of a new way of organizing society grounded in new modes of thought in business, religion, politics, and science. Our modern world emerged Enlightened as it could from this roiling cauldron of forces.

In IT we may have had a Leonardo da Vinci or even a Galileo, but we’ve never had our Newton. Maybe we don't need a towering genius to make everything clear? For years startups, like the frenetically inventive age of the 17th and 18th centuries, have been creating a New System of the World for IT from a mix of ideas that many thought crazy at first, but have turned out to be the founding principles underlying our modern world of IT.

If you haven’t guessed it yet, I’m going to make the case that the New System of the World for IT is that much over hyped word: cloud. I hope to show, using many real examples from real startups, that the cloud is built on a powerful system of ideas and technologies that make it a superior model for delivering IT.

IT has had an explosion of creativity: open source, deep and powerful tool chains, lean and agile development, cloud computing, virtualization, BigData, parallel programming, distributed monitoring, distributed programming, NoSQL, cost driven programming, dynamic languages, real-time processing, asynchronous programming, distributed teams, mobile platforms, viral loops, flat networks, software defined networking, wimpy cores, DevOps, everything as a service, infrastructure as code, and so on and so on. Astounding innovation wherever you look.

We are just now figuring out what new structures and systems are replacing the old, but if you step back a bit, what seems to be happening is we are creating a new “frame” using a bottom up methodology that just may be a new System of the World for IT. What is merging is a new way of working synthesised from all the diverse forces catalogued above. We’ve created a sort of new physics of development in place of a collection of prescientific alchemical lore. 

Since it is startups tackling problems that can’t be solved using traditional methods, it is through them that we’ll explore this new System of the World or IT.

It’s Not All About the Cloud, but It’s Mostly About the Cloud

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