Strategy
Power on a cell phone is like water in a desert. It’s the very stuff of life. If you take the same naive programming techniques you learned when programming on a server in a datacenter your cell phone will die of thirst. This is dramatically shown by Reto Meier,
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Who's Hiring? * Evernote is hiring a Senior DevOps Engineer in our mission to help the world remember everything. Our work environment is collaborative and relaxed, our benefits and perks are fantastic, and we enrich the lives of more than 65 million users worldwide every day! Please apply here.
Strategy
This is a guest post by Nick Burling, VP of Product Management of Bluestripe. Readers of High Scalability know are well versed in performance optimization techniques. Reverse proxies, Varnish, Redis — you hear about them daily. But what you may not realize is that one of the oldest technologies in your
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Hey, it's HighScalability time (this week is a fall harvest basket overflowing with good nutritious wisdom): (Voyager: 36 yrs & 11B miles has reached interstellar space. So it begins...) * 170 million: metrics Twitter collects every minute; 350 million: Snapchat daily photo shares * Quotable Quotes: * @blowmage: OH: “Guys, databases
Strategy
Tom Preston-Werner, GitHub Cofounder, wrote Ten Lessons from GitHub’s First Year in 2008. Though the lessons are still relevant, and the war stories behind each lesson are great, I can't help but wonder what a 2013 version would look like? 1. Start Early - GitHub created a
Strategy
This is a guest post by Zardosht Kasheff, Software Developer at Tokutek, a storage engine company that delivers 21st-Century capabilities to the leading open source data management platforms. As software developers, we value abstraction. The simpler the API, the more attractive it becomes. Arguably, MongoDB’s greatest strengths are its
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Hey, it's HighScalability time: (Unidentified Ivy Bridge processor using 22 nanometer Tri-Gate transistors) * Quotable Quotes: * @pbailis: Big ups to AWS folks for following up re: all of my questions on cr1 provisioning. We saw a huge win moving from m1.xl to cr1.8xl * @rob_carlson: Packet switching
Paper
Ever wonder what powers Google's world spirit sensing Zeitgeist service? No, it's not a homunculus of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel sitting in each browser. It's actually a stream processing (think streaming MapReduce on steroids) system called MillWheel, described in this very well written paper:
Performance
This is a guest post by Brian Bulkowski, CTO and co-founder of Aerospike, a leading clustered NoSQL database, has worked in the area of high performance commodity systems since 1989. This blog post will tell you exactly how to build a multi-terabyte high throughput datacenter server. A fast, reliable multi-terrabyte
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Who's Hiring? * Evernote is hiring a Senior DevOps Engineer in our mission to help the world remember everything. Our work environment is collaborative and relaxed, our benefits and perks are fantastic, and we enrich the lives of more than 65 million users worldwide every day! Please apply here.
Hey, it's HighScalability time: (Nerd Power: Paul Kasemir software engineer AND American Ninja Warrior) * Two billion documents, 30 terabytes: Github source code indexed * Quotable Quotes: * David Krakauer: We fail to make intelligent machines because engineering is about putting together stupid components to make smart objects. Evolution is about
Problems
This article is a lightly edited version of 20 Obstacles to Scalability by Sean Hull (with permission) from the always excellent and thought provoking ACM Queue. 1. TWO-PHASE COMMIT Normally when data is changed in a database, it is written both to memory and to disk. When a commit happens,