Strategy
We've referenced this 189 slide masterpiece by Ask Bjorn Hansen before, but it was hidden without its own first class link. He describes his presentation as 3 hours of 5 minute lightening talks and that sounds about right. The presentation covers: overall platform and architecture considerations involved in
Example
ThePort Network's Director of Engineering, TJ Muehleman was kind of enough to share some of the architectural details for their white label social media system. It currently runs about 50 social networks varying in size from less than 1000 members to more than 300,000 members, all on
Product
One of the top recommendations from the collective wisdom contained in Real Life Architectures is to add monitoring to your system. Now! Loud is the lament for not adding monitoring early and often. The reason is easy to understand. Without monitoring you don't know what your system is
Strategy
AFK Partners has release what they feel are the Best Practices for Scalability: 1. Asynchronous - Use asynchronous communication when possible. 2. Swim Lanes – Create fault isolated “swim lanes” of hardware by customer segmentation. 3. Cache - Make use of cache at multiple layers. 4. Monitoring - Understand your application’
Paper
So far every massively scalable database is a bundle of compromises. For some the weak guarantees of Amazon's eventual consistency model are too cold. For many the strong guarantees of standard RDBMS distributed transactions are too hot. Google App Engine tries to get it just right with entity
Strategy
Update: Asynchronous HTTP cache validations. A proposed HTTP caching extension: if your application can afford to show slightly out of date content, then stale-while-revalidate can guarantee that the user will always be served directly from the cache, hence guaranteeing a consistent response-time user-experience. Caching is like aspirin for headaches. Head
Example
Update 2: Elastic Load Balancer and EC2 instance bandwidth. It turns out we are limited by bandwidth and not by CPU. Solution: use DNS Round Robin for two to three HighCPU medium instances. Update: The Skinny Straw: Cloud Computing's Bottleneck and How to Address It. For cloud computing,
Example
Update 4: Why you don’t want to shard. by Morgon on the MySQL Performance Blog. Optimize everything else first, and then if performance still isn’t good enough, it’s time to take a very bitter medicine. Update 3: Building Scalable Databases: Pros and Cons of Various Database Sharding
Example
Update 2: Stack Overflow Architecture Update - Now At 95 Million Page Views A Month Update: Startup – ASP.NET MVC, Cloud Scale & Deployment shows an interesting alternative approach for a Windows stack using ServerPath/GoGrid for a dedicated database machine, elastic VMs for the front end, and a free
Database
Update 8: Introducing MongoDB by Eliot Horowit. Update 7: The Future of Scalable Databases by Robin Mathew. Update 6: NoSQL : If Only it Was that Easy. BJ Clark lays down the law on which databases are scalable: Tokyo - NO, Redis - NO, Voldemort - YES, MongoDB - Not Yet,
Strategy
These are from Laura Thomson of OmniTi: 1. Profile early, profile often. Pick a profiling tool and learn it in and out. 2. Dev-ops cooperation is essential. The most critical difference in organizations that handles crises well. 3. Test on production data. Code behavior (especially performance) is often data driven.
humor
Another fun one... Should I be Worried About Scaling? What happens when the comfortable SQL world of yesterday changes out from under you? You feel like this (it uses some language picante so be advised): Here's a link to the source: http://browsertoolkit.com/fault-tolerance.png A great