Strategy
For years a war has been fought in the software architecture trenches between the ideal of decentralized services and the power and practicality of centralized services. Centralized architectures, at least at the management and control plane level, are winning. And Google not only agrees, they are enthusiastic adopters of this
Hey, it's HighScalability time: The world ends not with a bang, but with 1 exaFLOP of bitcoin whimpers. * Quotable Quotes: * @EtienneRoy: Algorithm: you must encode and leverage your ignorance, not only your knowledge #hadoopsummit - enthralling * Chris Brenny: A material is nothing without a process. While the constituent
Paper
Famous computer scientist Leslie Lamport is definitely not a worse is better kind of guy. In Computation and State Machines he wants to make the case that to get better programs we need to teach programmers to think better. And programmers will think better when they learn to think in
Strategy
In a recent thread on Hacker News one of the commenters mentioned that they use Digital Ocean for personal stuff, but use AWS for business. This DO for personal and AWS for business split has become popular enough that we can now give it a name: the Mullet Cloud Selection
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Who's Hiring? * We’re looking for talented and driven engineers who are passionate about scalability and reliability to help us build Layer, the open communications layer for the Internet. Layer enables app developers to easily build secure, scalable messaging, voice and video features into any app. For more
Example
When we last visited WhatsApp they’d just been acquired by Facebook for $19 billion. We learned about their early architecture, which centered around a maniacal focus on optimizing Erlang into handling 2 million connections a server, working on All The Phones, and making users happy through simplicity. Two years
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Hey, it's HighScalability time: Looks like a multiverse, if you can keep it. * Quotable Quotes: * @abt_programming: "I am a Unix Creationist. I believe the world was created on January 1, 1970 and as prophesized, will end on January 19, 2038" - @teropa * @demisbellot: Cloud prices
Strategy
Caching is not new of course, but I don't think I've heard of caching store procedure results before. It's like memoization in the database. Brent Ozar covers this idea in How to Cache Stored Procedure Results. The benefits are the usual for doing work
Strategy
Facebook has been teasing us. While many of their recent acquisitions have been surprising, shocking is the only word adequately describing Facebook's 5 day whirlwind acquisition of Oculus, immersive virtual reality visionaries, for a now paltry sounding $2 billion. The backlash is a pandemic, jumping across social networks
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This is a guest repost by Pete Soderling, Founder at Hakka Labs, creating a community where software engineers come to grow. In response to a recent post from MongoHQ entitled “You don’t have big data," I would generally agree with many of the author’s points. However, regardless
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Hey, it's HighScalability time: Isaac Newton's College Notebook, such a slacker. * Quotable Quotes: * Chris Anderson: Petabytes allow us to say: ‘Correlation is enough.’ * @adron: Back to writing the micro-services for my composite app with regionally distributed, highly available, key value crypto stores of unicorns! * DevOps Cafe:
Paper
Most every programmer who gets sucked into deep performance analysis for long running processes eventually realizes memory allocation is the heart of evil at the center of many of their problems. So you replace malloc with something less worse. Or you tune your garbage collector like a fine ukulele. But