Strategy
Aaron Kimball of Cloudera gives a wonderful 23 minute presentation titled Cloudera Hadoop Training: Thinking at Scale Cloudera which talks about "common challenges and general best practices for scaling with your data." As a company Cloudera offers "enterprise-level support to users of Apache Hadoop." Part of
Strategy
Update: Offloading ALL JS Files To Google. Now you can let Google serve all your javascript files. This article tells you how to do it (upload to Google Code Project) and why it's a big win (cheap, fast, caching, parallel downloads, save bandwidth). Don't have a
Strategy
Virtualization offers a lot of benefits, but it also comes with a cost (memory, CPU, network, IO, licensing). If you are in or running a cloud then some form of virtualization may not even be an option. But if you are running your own string of servers you can choose
Example
Update 7: Basecamp, now with more vroom. Basecamp application servers running Ruby code were upgraded and virtualization was removed. The result: A 66 % reduction in the response time while handling multiples of the traffic is beyond what I expected. They still use virtualization (Linux KVM), just less of it now.
Strategy
Update 8: The Cost of Latency by James Hamilton. James summarizing some latency info from Steve Souder, Greg Linden, and Marissa Mayer. Speed [is] an undervalued and under-discussed asset on the web. Update 7: How do you know when you need more memcache servers?. Dathan Pattishall talks about using memcache
Paper
There have been reports that software engineering is dead. Maybe, like the future, software engineering is simply not evenly distributed? When you read this paper I think you'll agree there is some real engineering going on, it's just that most of the things we need to
In Scalability issues for dummies Alex Barrera talks movingly about the challenges he faces trying to scale his startup inkzee as the lone developer. Inkzee is an online news reader that automatically groups similar topics. This is a cool problem and is one you know right away is going to
traffic
Update 17: Are Wireless Road Trains the Cure for Traffic Congestion? BY ADDY DUGDALE. The concept of road trains--up to eight vehicles zooming down the road together--has long been considered a faster, safer, and greener way of traveling long distances by car Update 16: The first electric vehicle in the
It's hard to be a relational database lately. After years of faithful service everywhere you look the world is turning against you: Recently at the NoSQL conference 150 revolutionaries met with their new anti-RDBMS arms suppliers. And you know what happens when revolutionaries are motivated, educated, funded, and
Product
Update 3: Presentation from the NoSQL Conference: slides, video. Update 2: Jim Wilson helps with the Understanding HBase and BigTable by explaining them from a "conceptual standpoint." Update: InfoQ interview: HBase Leads Discuss Hadoop, BigTable and Distributed Databases. "MapReduce (both Google's and Hadoop's)
Product
Update 3: Presentation from the NoSQL conference: slides, video 1, video 2. Update 2: The folks at Hypertable would like you to know that Hypertable is now officially sponsored by Baidu, China’s Leading Search Engine. As a sponsor of Hypertable, Baidu has committed an industrious team of engineers, numerous
Database
Update 2: Presentation from the NoSQL conference: slides, video. Update: Why you won't be building your killer app on a distributed hash table by Jonathan Ellis. Why I think Cassandra is the most promising of the open-source distributed databases --you get a relatively rich data model and a