Strategy
If you are looking for an excellent overview of general architecture principles then take a look at Will Larson's Introduction to Architecting Systems for Scale. Based on his experiences at Yahoo! and Digg, Will covers key concepts in some depth. A quick gloss on the building blocks: 1.
Strategy
Debugging complex problems is 90% persistence and 50% cool tools. Brendan Gregg in 10 Performance Wins tells a fascinating story of how a team at Joyent solved some weird and challenging performance issues deep in the OS. It took lots of effort, DTrace, Flame Graphs, USE Method, and writing custom
Strategy
Amir Salihefendic, founder of Todoist and Wedoist, in How to create very reliable web services, has written an insightful post on strategies for creating reliable web services along with the tools needed to make it happen. * Realtime monitor everything. Create a clear picture of what's going on at
Strategy
Travis Reeder in Spikability - An Application's Ability to Handle Unknown and/or Inconsistent Load gives four good ways of handling spikey loads: 1. Have more resources than you'll ever need. Estimate the maximum traffic you'll need and keep that many servers running. Downside
Strategy
Wildly popular VC blogger Fred Wilson defines in an excellent 27 minute video the ten most important criteria he uses when deciding to give the gold, that is, fund a web application. Note, this video is from 2010, so no doubt the ideas are still valid, but the importance of
Strategy
In Secrets to Lightning Fast Mobile Design, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger shares three strategies Instagram uses to outsmart high latency mobile networks and make mobile apps feel faster than they really are, which helped Instagram reach 12 million users in 12 months: * The motivation: "mobile experiences fill gaps while
Strategy
In a great article, Amazon S3 Performance Tips & Tricks, Doug Grismore, Director of Storage Operations for AWS, has outed the secret arcana normally reserved for Premium Developer Support customers on how to really use S3: * Size matters. Workloads with less than 50-100 total requests per second don't
Example
99designs is a crowdsourced design contest marketplace based out of Melbourne Australia. The idea is that if you have a design you need created you create a contest and designers compete to give you the best design within your budget. If you are a medium sized commerce site this is
Strategy
Jeremiah Peschka with a great a set of Notes on Scalability, just in case you do reach your wildest expectations of success: 1. Build it to Break. Plan for the fact that everything you make is going to break. Design in layers that are independent and redundant. 2. Everything is
Strategy
Srinath Perera has put together a strong list of architecture patterns based on three meta patterns: distribution, caching, and asynchronous processing. He contends these three are the primal patterns and the following patterns are but different combinations: 1. LB (Load Balancers) + Shared nothing Units. Units that do not share anything
Example
In How to launch in a month and scale to a million users, Joseph Perla, Former VP of Technology and founding team of Turntable.fm, shares techniques he used to build and quickly scale his startups. The post is very well written and a must read. Here are the essentials:
Strategy
Sean Hull with two helpful posts: 5 Things That are Toxic to Scalability: 1. Object Relational Mappers. Create complex queries that hard to optimize and tweak. 2. Synchronous, Serial, Coupled or Locking Processes. Locks are like stop signs, traffic circles keep the traffic flowing. Row level locking is better than