Blog
Some intrepid company blogs are posting their technical challenges and how they solve them. I wish more would open up and talk about what they are doing as it helps everyone move forward. Here are a few blogs documenting their encounters with the bleeding edge: Flickr Digg LinkedIn Facebook Amazon
flickr
Update 3: The book was released! Find it on Amazon at The Art of Capacity Planning. Update 2: Maybe the iPhone can use a little capacity planning? What's Behind the iPhone 3G Glitches: One source says Apple programmed the Infineon chip to demand a more powerful 3G signal
Strategy
This strategy is stated perfectly by Flickr's Myles Grant: The Flickr engineering team is obsessed with making pages load as quickly as possible. To that end, we’re refactoring large amounts of our code to do only the essential work up front, and rely on our queuing system
One of the cool things about Mr. Scoble is he doesn't pretend to know everything, which can be an deadly boring affliction in this field. In this case Robert is asking for help in an upcoming interview. Maybe we can help? Here's Robert's plight:
Paper
Although the problem of scaling human genome sequencing is not exactly about building bigger, faster and more reliable websites it is most interesting in terms of scalability. The paper describes a new technology by the startup company Complete Genomics to sequence the full human genome for the fraction of the
This is a useful post by Frank Mashraqi, Director of Business Operations & Technical Strategy for a top 50 website that delivers billions of page views per month. Since scalability is considered a non-functional requirement, it is often overlooked in the hopes of decreasing time to market. Adding scalability down
Paper
I have introduced pattern languages in my earlier post on The Pattern Bible for Distributed Computing. Achieving highest possible scalability is a complex combination of many factors. This PLoP 2007 paper presents a pattern language that can be used to make a system highly scalable. The Scalability Pattern Language introduced
Grid
Compares MapReduce to other parallel processing approaches and suggests new paradigm for clouds and grids
Product
Kent Langley was kind enough to create a profile template for Joyent, Kent's new employer. Joyent is an infrastructure and development company that has put together a multi-site, multi-million dollar hosting setup for their own applications and for the use of others. Joyent competes with the likes of
distributed systems
Software design patterns are an emerging tool for guiding and documenting system design. Patterns usually describe software abstractions used by advanced designers and programmers in their software. Patterns can provide guidance for designing highly scalable distributed systems. Let's see how! Patterns are in essence solutions to problems. Most
Brian Zimmer, architect at travel startup Yapta, highlights some worst practices jeopardizing the growth and scalability of a system: * The Golden Hammer. Forcing a particular technology to work in ways it was not intended is sometimes counter-productive. Using a database to store key-value pairs is one example. Another example is
Product
Has a Java only Hadoop been getting you down? Now you can be Happy. Happy is a framework for writing map-reduce programs for Hadoop using Jython. It files off the sharp edges on Hadoop and makes writing map-reduce programs a breeze. There's really no history yet on Happy,