Strategy
Election night is a big traffic boost for news and social sites. Yahoo expects up to 400 million page views on Election Day. Data Center Knowledge has an excellent article how various sites are preparing to handle spikes in election night traffic. Some interesting bits: Prepare ahead. Don't
Strategy
Dormando shows an enlightened middle way for storing sessions in cache and the database. Sessions are a perfect cache candidate because they are transient, smallish, and since they are usually accessed on every page access removing all that load from the database is a good thing. But as Dormando points
Product
CTL is a flexible distributed control dispatching framework that enables you to break management processes into reusable control modules and execute them in distributed fashion over the network. From their website: CTL is a flexible distributed control dispatching framework that enables you to break management processes into reusable control modules
Example
What's cool about starting a new project is you finally have a chance to do it right. You of course eventually mess everything up in your own way, but for that one moment the world has a perfect order, a rightness that feels satisfying and good. Arne Claassen,
Strategy
This is a question everyone must struggle with when building out their datacenter. Storage choices are always the ones I have the least confidence in. David Marks in his blog You Can Change It Later! asks the question Should I get a SAN to scale my site architecture? and answers
Product
Update: Digg on their choice and use of Puppet. They chose puppet over cfengine, and bcfg2 because they liked Puppet's resource abstraction layer (RAL), the ability to implement configuration management incrementally, support for bundles, and the overall design philosophy. Puppet implements a declarative (what not how) configuration language
Strategy
OK, there is no "they" and "they" wouldn't care if you knew anyway. After all, this isn't a blog about really important stuff like investing, acne cures, or cheap natural cleansing products. But the secrets are real. Super cloud scaling consultant Kent
Paper
Abstract—This paper presents the architecture and characteristics of a memory database intended to be used as a cache engine for web applications. Primary goals of this database are speed and efficiency while running on SMP systems with several CPU cores (four and more). A secondary goal is the support
spam
Update: As expected I'm undergoing a massive spam attack for speaking truth to dark powers. This is the time to be strong. Together we can make a change. What change you may ask? I can't say, just change and lots more change. Let's link
Blog
Some intrepid company blogs are posting their technical challenges and how they solve them. I wish more would open up and talk about what they are doing as it helps everyone move forward. Here are a few blogs documenting their encounters with the bleeding edge: Flickr Digg LinkedIn Facebook Amazon
flickr
Update 3: The book was released! Find it on Amazon at The Art of Capacity Planning. Update 2: Maybe the iPhone can use a little capacity planning? What's Behind the iPhone 3G Glitches: One source says Apple programmed the Infineon chip to demand a more powerful 3G signal
Strategy
This strategy is stated perfectly by Flickr's Myles Grant: The Flickr engineering team is obsessed with making pages load as quickly as possible. To that end, we’re refactoring large amounts of our code to do only the essential work up front, and rely on our queuing system