Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.
If you are very comfortable with math and modeling Dr. Neil Gunther's Universal Scalability Law is a powerful way of predicting system performance and whittling down those bottlenecks. If not, the USL can be hard to wrap your head around. There's a free eBook for that.
Example
I noticed on Facebook during this horrible tragedy in Paris that there was some worry because not everyone had checked in using Safety Check (video). So I thought people might want to know a little more about how Safety Check works. If a friend or family member hasn't
hot links
Hey, it's HighScalability time: Gorgeous picture of where microbes live in species. Humans have the most. (M. WARDEH ET AL) * 14.3 billion: Alibaba single day sales; 1.55 billion: Facebook monthly active users; 6 billion: Snapchat video views per day; unlimited: now defined as 300 GB by
sponsored post
Who's Hiring? * Senior Devops Engineer - StatusPage.io is looking for a senior devops engineer to help us in making the internet more transparent around downtime. Your mission: help us create a fast, scalable infrastructure that can be deployed to quickly and reliably. * Digit Game Studios, Irish’s
Example
This is a guest repost by Chris Ueland, creator of Scale Scale, with a creative high level view of the Netflix stack. As we research and dig deeper into scaling, we keep running into Netflix. They are very public with their stories. This post is a round up that we
hot links
Hey, it's HighScalability time: Cool geneology of Relational Database Management Systems. * 9,000: Artifacts Uncovered in California Desert; 400 Million: LinkedIn members; 100: CEOs have more retirement assets than 41% of American families; $160B: worth of AWS; 12,000: potential age of oldest oral history; fungi: world'
Strategy
I've been bitten by this one. It happens when you quite naturally use the file system as a quick and dirty database. A directory is a lot like a table and a file name looks a lot like a key. You can store many-to-one relationships via subdirectories. And
Peter Bailis has released the work of a lifetime, his dissertion is now available online: Coordination Avoidance in Distributed Databases. The topic Peter is addressing is summed up nicely by his thesis statement: Many semantic requirements of database-backed applications can be efficiently enforced without coordination, thus improving scalability, latency, and
Example
This is a guest repost by Christophe Limpalair, creator of Scale Your Code. In this article, we take a look at methods used by Shopify to make their platform resilient. Not only is this interesting to read about, but it can also be practical and help you with your own
hot links
Hey, it's HighScalability time: Movie goers Force Crashed websites with record ticket presales. Yoda commented: Do. Or do not. There is no try. * $51.5 billion: Apple quarterly revenue; 1,481: distance in light years of a potential Dyson Sphere; $470 billion: size of insurance industry data play;
Example
IEEE Spectrum has a wonderful article series on Lessons From a Decade of IT Failures. It’s not your typical series in that there are very cool interactive graphs and charts based on data collected from past project failures. They are really fun to play with and I can only
sponsored post
Who's Hiring? * Digit Game Studios, Irish’s largest game development studio, is looking for game server engineers to work on existing and new mobile 3D MMO games. Our most recent project in development is based on an iconic AAA-IP and therefore we expect very high DAU & CCU