Strategy
One of the premier scaling strategies is always: get someone else to do the work for you. But unlike Huckleberry Finn in Tom Sawyer, you won't have to trick anyone into whitewashing a fence for you. Times have changed. Companies like Ning, Facebook, and Salesforce are more than
Cluster File System
pNFS (parallel NFS) is the next generation of NFS and its main claim to fame is that it's clustered, which "enables clients to directly access file data spread over multiple storage servers in parallel. As a result, each client can leverage the full aggregate bandwidth of a
Product
Update 2: 3tera has added Dynamic Appliances, which are "packaged data center operations like backup, migration or SLAs that users can add to their applications to provide functionality." Update: in an effort to help cross the chasm of how start building a website using their grid OS, 3tera
Strategy
Robert Stewart shared this useful Ajax related scalability strategy: We avoided XMLHttpRequests for individual keystrokes, choosing to go back to the server only when a field lost focus. Google can afford all the servers to handle the load for that, but we didn't want to. Do you have
replication
File replication based on erasure codes can reduce total replicas size 2 times and more.
AJAX
I've been using GWT for an application and I get the same feeling using it that I first got using html. I've always sucked at building UIs. Starting with programming HP terminals, moving on to the Apple Lisa, then X Windows, and Microsoft Windows, I just
Product
Complex applications coordinating work across a lot of machines often need a highly performing fault tolerant message layer. Though a blast to write, it's probably a better use of your time to use an off the shelf solution. And that's where Spread comes in. Flickr, for
Strategy
Colin Charles has cool picture showing Flickr's message telling him they'll need about 15 minutes to move his 11,500 images to another shard. One, that's a lot of pictures! Two, it just goes to show you don't have to make this
Product
How do you keep in sync a crescendo of data between data centers over a slow WAN? That's the question Alberto posted a few weeks ago. Normally I'm not into all boy bands, but I was frustrated there wasn't a really good answer for
Paper
A superb explanation by Theo Schlossnagle of how to deploy a high availability load balanced system using mod backhand and Wackamole. The idea is you don't need to buy expensive redundant hardware load balancers, you can make use of the hosts you already have to the same effect.
Example
Pownce is a new social messaging application competing micromessage to micromessage with the likes of Twitter and Jaiku. Still in closed beta, Pownce has generously shared some of what they've learned so far. Like going to a barrel tasting of a young wine and then tasting the same
Paper
The article describes the basic architecture of a connection-oriented NIO-based java server. It takes a look at a preferred threading model, Java Non-blocking I/O and discusses the basic components of such a server.