Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.
This is an excerpt from my article Building Super Scalable Systems: Blade Runner Meets Autonomic Computing in the Ambient Cloud. As I was writing an article on the architecture of the Storm Botnet, I couldn't help but notice the deep similarity of how Storm works and changes we&
Strategy
We can all learn from problems. The Google App Engine team has created a teachable moment through a remarkably honest and forthcoming post-mortem for February 24th, 2010 outage post, chronicling in elaborate detail a power outage that took down Google App Engine for a few hours. The world is ending!
Example
This is a guest post by Dan Bartow, VP of SOASTA, talking about how they pelted MySpace with 1 million concurrent users using 800 EC2 instances. I thought this was an interesting story because: that's a lot of users, it takes big cajones to test your live site
hot links
* Getting Real about NoSQL and the SQL-Isn't-Scalable Lie by Dennis Forbes. Buoyed by Canada's Olympic success, Dennis is going for the gold in that least real of sports, the NoSQL vs SQL pursuit. * Design Patterns for Distributed Non-Relational Databases by Todd Lipcon. Great coverage of consistent
This is an excerpt from my article Building Super Scalable Systems: Blade Runner Meets Autonomic Computing in the Ambient Cloud. The future looks many, big, complex, and adaptive: 1. Many clouds. 2. Many servers. 3. Many operating systems. 4. Many languages. 5. Many storage services. 6. Many database services. 7.
Memcached
If you look at the early days of this blog, when web scalability was still in its heady bloom of youth, many of the articles had to do with leveraging MySQL and memcached. Exciting times. Shard MySQL to handle high write loads, cache objects in memcached to handle high read
papers
The world of scalable databases is not a simple one. They come in every race, creed, and color. Rick Cattell has brought some harmony to that world by publishing High Performance Scalable Data Stores, a nicely detailed one stop shop paper comparing scalable databases soley on the content of their
hot links
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’
jobs
There was a bit of drama earlier when I posted a free job opening for Zynga. It caused unfortunate and just plain wrong accusations. It also caused a number of requests for more free job posts, which I should have anticipated, but obviously I can't let this blog
Example
If Twitter is the “nervous system of the web” as some people think, then what is the brain that makes sense of all those signals (tweets) from the nervous system? That brain is the Twitter Analytics System and Kevin Weil, as Analytics Lead at Twitter, is the homunculus within in
nosql
While exploring deep into some dusty old library stacks, I dug up Nostradamus' long lost NoSQL codex. What are the chances? Strangely, it also gave the plot to the next Dan Brown novel, but I left that out for reasons of sanity. About NoSQL, here is what Nosty (his
Strategy
Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood are raising VC money for StackOverflow. This is interesting for three reasons: 1) Joel has always seemed like a keep it small and grow organically type of guy, so this is a big step in a different direction. 2) It means they think there'