Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For February 29, 2013

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

Unfortunately with Delicious still down access to all my lovingly curated links is out. But the show must go on...

• Quotable Quotes:
  • @muratdemirbas: In the cloudcomputing webservices domain antifragility= elastic scalability + network effect
  • @SQLPerfTips: More hardware won't solve response time problems. Proper indexing does.
  • Stefan Boberg: The fastest I/O request is the one you dont'!
  • Alan Kay: The key in making great and growable systems is much more to design how its modules communicate rather than what their internal properties and behaviors should be.
  • antirez: One thing, more than everything else, keeps me focused while programming: never interrupt the flow.
• The NPR apps team shows How to build a news app that never goes down and costs you practically nothing. Two servers provide high reliability at very little cost. Even on election night only one server was required. They use Flask, Jinja, LESS, JST, Bootstrap, Fab, git, Python, Node.js, and S3 to serve static content. Excellent description of their low cost, low overhead process.
• Spotify sings In praise of “boring” technology: More often than not, the right tool for the job is piece of software that has been around for some time, with proven success. One example would be writing a backend service in Java or Python instead of Go or Node.JS. Another example would be storing data in MySQL or PostgreSQL instead of MongoDB or Riak. < They are looking into Zookeeper to replace DNS for more dynamic configuration and Cassandra to handle distributed writes.
• The End of Scalability?: We are likely to see continued improvement in IaaS and PaaS solutions that auto-scale and perform to such a degree that most applications will not need to worry about scaling because of user traffic. 
• Slides for the Strata Conference are up. Videos in a few weeks.
• The Google Cloud Tech Talk. A good general introduction to cloud computing by Anthony Voellm and a useful peek into the Google Cloud Platform.
• #hangops is a informal hangout dedicated to talking about all things DevOps. It makes up in practical industry IQ for what it lacks in production values. You also may be interested in DevOps Cafe. 
• Scaling the Pipeline. Stefan Boberg looks at the incredibly complex process of making a modern game by showing how assets are handled and then working backwards through the pipe. Huge amounts of data combine with huge numbers of collaborators. Fascinating.
• CloudantGeo looks interesting. simple JSON over HTTP, automatic sharding, and spatio-temporal queries.
• There are various scalability meetups around the world you may be interested in: Seattle, Toronto, for example.
• colmmacc recommends keeping everything static in Apache so threads aren't created and deleted during load: MaxClients         1000 MinSpareThreads    1000 MaxSpareThreads    1000   ThreadsPerChild      25
• Lots of good discussion around MarkedUp's Cassandra, Hive, and Hadoop: How We Picked Our Analytics Stack: Cassandra, Hive, and Hadoop ended up being the right tools for us at this stage, but we only arrived at that conclusion after actually doing live acceptance tests and performance tests.
• Netflix announces EVCache: Distributed in-memory datastore for Cloud. It's clustered caching combined with zone aware goodness. Netflix uses it to cache user Users Taste, Movie Viewing History, Queue, Rating, etc. 
• Chef seems to be racking up the industry wins: Facebook, EC2, Zynga, and CERN.