Hot Scalability Links for February 24, 2010

  1. Cassandra @ Twitter: An Interview with Ryan King. Great interview by Alex Popescu on Twitter's thought process for switching to Cassandra. Twitter chose Cassandra because it had more big system features out of the box. Is that Cassandra FTW?
  2. I Had Downtime Today. Here’s What I’m Doing About It by Patrick McKenzie. Awesome deep dive into went wrong with Bingo Card Creator. Sh*t happens. How do you design a process to help prevent it from happening and how do you deal with problems with integrity when they do?
  3. High Availability Principle : Request Queueing by Ashish Soni. Queue request to ride out traffic spikes: 1) Request Queuing allows your system to operate at optimal throughput. 2) Your users only experience linear degradation versus exponential degradation. 3) Your system experiences NO degradation.
  4. pfffft twatter tweeter by Knowbuddy. The reason you should care [about NoSQL] is because now you have more options--you're not stuck trying to wedge your system into a relational model if you don't want to. And isn't /. all about freedom of choice?
  5. Wordpress, Varnish and Edge Side Includes. Using Varnish to go from .63 requests per second to 537.44 requests per second.
  6. Facebook’s Petabyte Scale Data Warehouse using Hive and Hadoop by Ashish Thusoo and Namit Jain. How does Facebook deal with 12 TB of compressed new data everyday? They get a bad case of the Hives.
  7. PyCon 2010: What every developer should know about database scalability by Jonathan Ellis. Comes a close to living up to the title as you can in a 45 minute presentation. Also helps explain why Twitter chose Cassandra.
  8. How to Make Life Suck Less! (when building scalable systems) by Bradford Stephens. 1) Plan for everything to fail. 2) Test constantly in production. 3) Systems software requires computer science. 4) Don't build it if you don't have to.
  9. Oh Shit: How to Break a Large Website (and how not to) by Tim Morgan. How Scribd scales a big Rails app. Lots of good low level detail on how to get Rails to perform. 1) Always understand the queries your code is generating. 2) Test with a heavily populated database. 3)Pay close attention to your indexes.
  10. Scaling Web Applications with HMVC by Sam de Freyssinet. The Hierarchical-Model-View-Controller (HMVC) pattern is a direct extension to the MVC pattern that manages to solve many of the scalability issues.
  11. Scaling python webapps from 0 to 50 million users - A top-down approach by Jinal Jhaveri. How to solve the performance issues for big social games. Talks about bottlenecks and solutions for: load balancer, web server, web application, browser.
  12. Making Facebook 2x Faster by Jason Sobel. How Facebook attacked network time, generation time, and render time.
  13. One in a million happens a lot when your site is big By Gabriel Weinberg. You dismiss something saying that will never happen. Well, When you get those kinds of numbers [large], the one in a million occurrence happens quite frequently
  14. How Intel Manages 100,000 Servers by Rich Miller.
  15. Cloud platform choices: a developer's-eye view by Ian Wilkes. Cloud computing has been variously dismissed as a fad, a fraud, or even a corporate conspiracy to rob us of our property rights. But for software developers, cloud computing services are a very real and legitimate alternative to traditional server environments, and are only becoming more so.

Product Announcements

  1. Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances with Windows Now Available
  2. Eucalyptus Completes Amazon Web Services Specs with Latest Release
  3. Gear6 Introducing the first commercial Memcached service for cloud platforms