Example
I know people are always interested in what others are using to build their systems. Alex Payne, CTO of the new startup BankSimple, gives us a quick hit on their toolchain choices in this Quora thread. BankSimple positions itself as a customer-focused alternative to online banking. You may remember Alex
Hadoop
A demonstration, with repeatable steps, of how to quickly fire-up a Hadoop cluster on Amazon EC2, load data onto the HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File-System), write map-reduce scripts in Ruby and use them to run a map-reduce job on your Hadoop cluster. You will not need to ssh into the cluster,
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Who's Hiring? * Electronic Art's is hiring a QA Engineer and a Cloud Architect for their Pogo.com team. Fun and Informative Events * A new round of Membase meetups have been planned for January 2011 for San Diego, Denver, Seattle, Vancouver and Chicago. * O'Reilly'
hot links
Submitted for your reading pleasure... * Quotable Quotes * @hofmanndavid: Performance and scalability anxiety makes developers want to catch the flying butterflies * @tivrfoa: "Scalability solutions aren't magic. They involve partitioning, indexing and replication." Twitter engineer * Alan Perlis: Fools ignore complexity; pragmatists suffer it; experts avoid it; geniuses remove
To celebrate the new year Facebook has shared the results of a little end of the year introspection. It has been a fecund year for Facebook: * 43,869,800 changed their status to single * 3,025,791 changed their status to "it's complicated" * 28,460,516
Example
How do you keep a system small enough, while still being successful, that a simple scale-up strategy becomes the preferred architecture? StackOverflow, for example, could stick with a tool chain they were comfortable with because they had a natural brake on how fast they could grow: there are only so
Strategy
In 5 Lessons We’ve Learned Using AWS, Netflix's John Ciancutti says the best way to avoid failure is to fail constantly. In the cloud it's expected instances can fail at any time, so you always have to be prepared. In the real world we prepare
Paper
For a great Christmas read forget The Night Before Christmas, a heart warming poem written by Clement Moore for his children, that created the modern idea of Santa Clause we all know and anticipate each Christmas eve. Instead, curl up with a some potent eggnog, nog being any drink made
nosql
This is a guest post by Frédéric Faure (architect at Ysance), you can follow him on twitter. Data storage has always been one of the most difficult problems to address, especially as the quantity of stored data is constantly increasing. This is not simply due to the growing numbers of
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Who's Hiring? * Electronic Art's is hiring a QA Engineer and a Cloud Architecture Technical Director II for their Pogo.com team. Fun and Informative Events * A new round of Membase meetups have been planned for January 2011 for San Diego, Denver, Seattle, Vancouver and Chicago. Cool
Strategy
In 5 Lessons We’ve Learned Using AWS, Netflix's John Ciancutti says one of the big lessons they've learned is to create less chatty protocols: In the Netflix data centers, we have a high capacity, super fast, highly reliable network. This has afforded us the luxury
hot links
* If you missed it here's a link to my webinar and here's the slidedeck for the talk with a buch of additional slides that I didn't have a chance to talk about. The funky picture of Lincoln is classic. * Can MySQL really handle 1,