10 Hot Scalability Links for January 13, 2010

  1. Has Amazon EC2 become over subscribed? by Alan Williamson. Systemic problems hit AWS as users experience problems across Amazon's infrastructure. It seems the strange attractor of a cloud may be the same as for a shared hosting service.
  2. Understanding Infrastructure 2.0 by James Urquhart. We need to take a systems view of our entire infrastructure, and build our automation around the end-to-end architecture of that system.
  3. Hey You, Get Off of My Cloud: Exploring Information Leakage in Third-Party Compute Clouds. We show that it is possible to map the internal cloud infrastructure.
  4. Hadoop World: Building Data Intensive Apps with Hadoop and EC2  by Pete Skomoroch. Dives into detail about how he built TrendingTopics.org using Hadoop and EC2.
  5. A Crash Course in Modern Hardware by Cliff Click. Yes, your mind will hurt after watching this. And no, you probably don't know what your microprocessor is doing anymore.
  6. EVE Scalability Explained by James Harrison. This post aims to demystify EVE’s architecture and explain in simple terms what EVE’s current issues with scaling for fleet fights are, and approaches for fixing them.
  7. Conversations About the Internet #5: Anonymous Facebook Employee by Phil Wong. Provides an interesting snapshot of the inner workings and culture of Facebook in the summer of 2009. Is it real or made up? It all sounds plausible to me so I think it's real.
  8. Evented I/O based web servers, explained using bunnies by Simon Willison. Use asyncrhonous calls because it keeps the bunnies busy.
  9. Vint Cerf: It's like 1973 for Moving Data Around in the Cloud by Alex Williams. Make sure you know how to export your data. And try and use your own interfaces in front of custom services. that way if you want to move, you just have to write an adapter, and not a complete re-architecture.
  10. How This Web Site Uses MongoDB by Ian White. But overall, MongoDB is probably well-suited for a lot of web applications -- maybe as many as 50%.
  11. Bandwidth Pricing Trends: Cost To Stream A Movie Today, Five Cents: In 1998, $270 by Dan Rayburn. And it's sill hard to make money.