Scalability
Successful software design is all about trade-offs. In the typical (if there is such a thing) distributed system, recognizing the importance of trade-offs within the design of your architecture is integral to the success of your system. Despite this reality, I see time and time again, developers choosing a particular
Example
Update:Presentation: Second Life’s Architecture. Ian Wilkes, VP of Systems Engineering, describes the architecture used by the popular game named Second Life. Ian presents how the architecture was at its debut and how it evolved over years as users and features have been added. Second Life is a 3-D
jobs
I thought with the job situation these days that people might be interested in some open jobs at Facebook. Here's what's available:
Strategy
Our latest strategy is taken from a great post by Paul Saab of Facebook, detailing how with changes Facebook has made to memcached they have: ...been able to scale memcached to handle 200,000 UDP requests per second with an average latency of 173 microseconds. The total throughput achieved is
Paper
An excellent article by Bryan Cantrill and Jeff Bonwick on how to write multi-threaded code. With more processors and no magic bullet solution for how to use them, knowing how to write multiprocessor code that doesn't screw up your system is still a valuable skill. Some topics: Know
Product
At 37 Signals Joshua Sierles describes how 37 Signals uses Sprinkle to configure their servers within EC2. Sprinkle defines a domain specific meta-language for describing and processing the installation of software. You can find an interesting discussion of Sprinkle's creation story by the creator himself, Marcus Crafter, in
Java
OK, this interview is with me on Java scalability issues. I sound like a bigger idiot than I would like, but I suppose it could have been worse. The Java World folks were very nice and did a good job, so there’s no blame on them :-) The interview
Product
In Log Everything All the Time I advocate applications shouldn't bother logging at all. Why waste all that time and code? No, wait, that's not right. I preach logging everything all the time. Doh. Facebook obviously feels similarly which is why they opened sourced Scribe, their
Cluster File System
Update 2: Sorting 1 PB with MapReduce. PB is not peanut-butter-and-jelly misspelled. It's 1 petabyte or 1000 terabytes or 1,000,000 gigabytes. It took six hours and two minutes to sort 1PB (10 trillion 100-byte records) on 4,000 computers and the results were replicated thrice on
Scalability
Data centers are reshaping themselves by taking ideas from public cloud providers, such as Amazon and Google. The idea is to make the data center more cost-effective by enabling on-demand utility-based computing rather than dedicated machines. At the same time, it is clear that to make IT operations more effective,
Blog
Update 2: Overcast: Conversations on Cloud Computing. Listened to the first two podcasts and they're doing a great job. Worth a look. The singing and dance routines are way over the top however :-) Update: 9 Sources of Cloud Computing News You May Not Know About by James
Strategy
Plenty of Fish CEO Markus Frind, famous nerd hero for making over $10 million a year from Google ads on a free dating site he made and ran all by himself, now sees a problem with the free model: As one commenter succinctly put it: the “golden time” of AdSense