Strategy
Good article from manageability.com summarizing design patterns from Pat Helland's amazing paper Life beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate's Opinion. 1. Entities are uniquely identified - each entity which represents disjoint data (i.e. no overlap of data between entities) should have a unique key. 2.
It's time to do something a little different and for me that doesn't mean cutting off my hair and joining a monastery, nor does it mean buying a cherry red convertible (yet), it means doing a webinar! * On December 14th, 2:00 PM - 3:00
I think I have been lucky that several of the projects I been worked on have exposed me to having to manage large volumes of data. The largest dataset was probably at MailChannels, though Livedoor.com also had some sizeable data for their books store and department store. Most of
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Who's Hiring? * Appirio is hiring 5 core product engineers for one of Silicon's Valley's "most promising startups". Fun and Informative Events * A new round of Membase meetups have been planned for January 2011 for San Diego, Denver, Seattle, Vancouver and Chicago. * Announcing
nosql
It's a truism that we should choose the right tool for the job. Everyone says that. And who can disagree? The problem is this is not helpful advice without being able to answer more specific questions like: What jobs are the tools good at? Will they work on
Paper
In some ways the original Amazon cloud, the one most of us still live in, was like that really cool house that when you stepped inside and saw the old green shag carpet in the living room, you knew the house hadn't been updated in a while. The
Strategy
Ricky Ho in Scalable System Design Patterns has created a great list of scalability patterns along with very well done explanatory graphics. A summary of the patterns are: 1. Load Balancer - a dispatcher determines which worker instance will handle a request based on different policies. 2. Scatter and Gather
Who's Hiring? * Appirio is hiring 5 core product engineers for one of Silicon's Valley's "most promising startups". * Undertone is looking for a Software Engineer and a QA Engineer. Fun and Informative Events * Announcing My Webinar On December 14th: What Should I Do?
In many of the recent discussions on the design of large scale systems (a.k.a. Web Scale) it was argued that the right set of tradeoffs for building large scale systems would be to give away Consistency for Availability and Partition tolerance. Those arguments relied on the foundation of
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Eating turkey all weekend and wondering what you might have missed? * James Hamilton on why “all you have learned about disks so far is probably wrong" in Availability in Globally Distributed Storage. It turns out for the same reason our financial systems melt down: black swans. The world is
lecture
Professor David Malan gives a very good lecture on scalability for dynamic websites. It's not highly technical, it's an extension course, but it's a great introduction to a wide variety of topics. I really like his teaching style. He continually asks questions, prompts for
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Who's Hiring? * Imo is Hiring an Operations Engineer for a startup web-based service supporting multiple IM protocols. * Appirio is hiring 5 core product engineers for one of Silicon's Valley's "most promising startups". * Tuenti is hiring both a FrontEnd and BackEnd Engineer. * Undertone