Smart Companies Fail Because they Do Everything Right - Staying Alive to Scale

Wired has a wonderful interview with Clayton Christensen, author of the tech ninja's bible, Innovator's Dilemma. Innovation is the name of the game in Silicon Valley and if you want to understand the rules of the game this article is a quick and clear way of learning. Everything is simply explained with compelling examples by the man himself.

Just as every empire has fallen, every organization is open to disruption. It's the human condition to become comfortable and discount potential dangers. It takes a great deal of mindfulness to outwit and outlast the human condition. If you want to be the disruptor and avoid being the disruptee, this is good stuff.

He also talks about his new book, The Capitalist's Dilemma, which addresses this puzzle: if corporations are doing so well why are individuals doing so bad?

If someone can help you see a deep meaningful pattern in life then they haven't brought you a fish, they've taught you how to fish. That's what Christensen does. Here's a gloss of his world view changing points:

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Puppet monitoring: how to monitor the success or failure of Puppet runs

This is a guest post by LogicMonitor's Director of Tech Ops, Jesse Aukeman, about the different ways they're monitoring the success or failure of Puppet runs.

If you are like us, you are running some type of linux configuration management tool. The value of centralized configuration and deployment is well known and hard to overstate. Puppet is our tool of choice. It is powerful and works well for us, except when things don't go as planned. Failures of puppet can be innocuous and cosmetic, or they can cause production issues, for example when crucial updates do not get properly propagated.

Why?

In the most innocuous cases, the puppet agent craps out (we run puppet agent via cron). As nice as puppet is, we still need to goose it from time to time to get past some sort of network or host resource issue. A more dangerous case is when an administrator temporarily disables puppet runs on a host in order to perform some test or administrative task and then forgets to reenable it. In either case it’s easy to see how a host may stop receiving new puppet updates. The danger here is that this may not be noticed until that crucial update doesn't get pushed, production is impacted, and it’s the client who notices.

How to implement monitoring?

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Sponsored Post: OLO, Amazon, Zoosk, aiCache, Teradata Aster, Aerospike, Percona, ScaleOut, New Relic, Logic Monitor, AppDynamics, ManageEngine, Site24x7

Who's Hiring?

• OLO's food ordering platform powers some of the largest restaurant chains and feeds millions of consumers. We're looking for Senior C# Software Engineers and DevOps Engineers to help us scale our system. Apply here.
• The AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) automates management of relational databases in the cloud. We have a wide variety of customers and are part of many mission-critical applications, like the ones built by the 2012 Obama re-election campaign. If you're interested in joining a fast-growing service and team, please send your resume to rds-jobs@amazon.com.
• Hiring! Director of Site Operations at Zoosk.  We’re looking for an innovator. Someone who wants to take site operations along with a smart team of Sys Admins to the next level. This is a very hands-on leadership role in a high-availability production environment. Full details here. 
• Teradata Aster is looking for Distributed Systems, Analytic Applications,  and Performance Architects. As a member of the Architecture Group you will help define the technical roadmap for the product.
• The New York Times is seeking a developer focused on infrastructure to join its newsroom development team. Read the full description here and send resumes to chadas@nytimes.com.
• New Relic is looking for a Java Scalability Engineer in Portland, OR. Ready to scale a web service with more incoming bits/second than Twitter?  http://newrelic.com/about/jobs
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Fun and Informative Events

• It's back! Join the MySQL Community at the annual Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, April 22-25. This year's conference features an outstanding lineup of 92 speakers delivering 112 breakout sessions over three days! 

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• ManageEngine Applications Manager : Monitor physical, virtual and Cloud Applications.
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Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For February 15, 2013

Hey, it's HighScalability time: 

• The Herokulypse. A cautionary tale of what can happen when scalability is left for later. Rap Genius created quite a stir (reddit, Hacker News) when they documented high costs ($20K/month for 15 million monthly uniques) and poor performance (6 second average response times) using Heroku's random routing mesh. The cause was tracked to queuing at the dyno level when the expectation was requests are routed to free dynos. Heroku admits this is a problem. So poor load balancing combined with RoR single threading = poor performance, one that adding more dynos and spending more money won't necessarily help. While it seems clear Heroku didn't make this aspect of their system crystal clear, the incident has generated a lot of teaching moments, if you slog through it all. This is a developing story.
• You need money to feed the beast. Fred Wilson has some revenue ideas for you: Paid App Downloads - ex. WhatsApp; In-app purchases - ex. Zynga Poker; In-app subscriptions - ex. NY Times app; Advertising - ex. Flurry, AdMob; Digital-to-physical - ex. Red Stamp, Postagram; Transactions - ex Hailo. 

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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When all the Program's a Graph - Prismatic's Plumbing Library

At some point as a programmer you might have the insight/fear that all programming is just doing stuff to other stuff.

Then you may observe after coding the same stuff over again that stuff in a program often takes the form of interacting patterns of flows.

Then you may think hey, a program isn't only useful for coding datastructures, but a program is a kind of datastructure and that with a meta level jump you could program a program in terms of flows over data and flow over other flows.

That's the kind of stuff Prismatic is making available in the Graph extension to their plumbing package (code examples), which is described in an excellent post: Graph: Abstractions for Structured Computation.

You may remember Prismatic from previous profile we did on HighScalability: Prismatic Architecture - Using Machine Learning On Social Networks To Figure Out What You Should Read On The Web. We learned how Prismatic, an interest driven content suggestion service, builds programs in terms of graph stuff:

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7 Sensible and 1 Really Surprising Way EVE Online Scales to Play Huge Games

"Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult." -- Carl von Clausewitz

Games are proving grounds for software architecture. They combine scale, high performance, challenging problems, a rabid user base, cost sensitivity, and the need for profit. And when games have in-game currency, like EVE Online has, there's money at play, so you can't just get away with a c'est la vie attitude. Engineering must be applied. 

In Planning for war: how the EVE Online servers deal with a 3,000 person battle, we learn some techniques EVE Online uses to handle large games:

7 Sensible...

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At Scale Even Little Wins Pay Off Big - Google and Facebook Examples

There's a popular line of thought that says don't waste time on optimization because developing features is more important than saving money. True, you can always add resources, but at some point, especially in a more mature part of a product lifecycle: performance equals $$$.

Two great examples of this evolution come from Facebook and Google. The upshot is that when you spend time and money on optimizing your tool chain you can get huge wins in performance, control, and costs. Certainly, don’t bother if you are just starting, but at some point you may want to switch to big development efforts in improving efficiency.

Facebook and HipHop

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Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For February 8, 2013

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

• 34TB : storage for GitHub search; 2,880,000,000: log lines per day
• Quotable Quotes:
  • @peakscale: The "IKEA effect"  << Contributes to NIH and why ppl still like IaaS over PaaS. :-\
  • @sheeshee: module named kafka.. creates weird & random processes, sends data from here to there & after 3 minutes noone knows what's happening anymore?
  • @sometoomany: Ceased writing a talk about cloud computing infrastructure, and data centre power efficiency. Bored myself to death, but saved others.


• Lots of heat on Is MongoDB's fault tolerance broken? Yes it is. No it's not. YES it is. And the score: MongoDB Is Still Broken by Design 5-0.


• Every insurgency must recruit from an existing population which is already affiliated elsewhere. For web properties the easiest group to recruit is the younger demographic. They naturally want something different than their elders and they have fewer allegiances to defend. What's your counter insurgency strategy?

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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Ask HighScalability: Web asset server concept - 3rd party software available?

This article describes the idea of a website asset service for the author's dynamic websites. It deals as a request for comments and also as a request for hints to existing 3rd party software.

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Super Bowl Advertisers Ready for the Traffic? Nope..It's Lights Out.

Advertising for the Super Bowl is bigger than the game for many viewers. So you gotta figure advertisers are ready for the traffic bursts generated by their expensive ads? Not exactly...

Yottaa reports an amazing 13 advertiser websites crashed during the Super Bowl. Coke was interactively au currant, asking viewers to vote for the ending of a commercial, but load times went to 62 seconds. SodaStream, Calvin Klein, Axe, Got Milk? The Walking Dead, many movie sites, and many car sites, all were flagged with delay of fame penalties.

Lots of time, money, and creative energy is spent lovingly perfecting every detail of these commercials. It won't be a surprise to any programmer that this can't usually be said of the follow through on the backend.

So what can you do? Yottaa has some good tips and Michael Hamrah has a wonderful post on dealing with the Super Bowl Burst Problem:

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