Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For July 12, 2013

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

(The Shard Scaling 6)

• 3500+: number of species found underneath miles of ice; 360 TB/disc data capacity: 5D optical memory in glass; 50% Of Internet Traffic: Comes From Only 35 Sites/Services; 60 billion: potential alien planets that could give Snowden asylum
• Quotable Quotes:
  • @ieure: "How concert app Loudie doubled its users in two weeks" The other co-founder finally signed in.
  • @michalbe: "Daddy, how is software made?" "Well, when a programmer loves an idea very much they stay up all night and then push to github the next day"
  • @TomDSweeney: Alan Kay: “The past 30 years have been completely mundane. It’s all been scaling (of old technology) and Angry Birds”
  • Rick Branson: Adopt a technology by understanding what it's best at and letting it do that first, then expand…
  • K. Eric Drexler: System-level design seeks flexible models and accepts complexity, accepts imprecision and buries it in margins of safety, recognizes unpredictability and seeks to avoid it, embraces competing options and seeks to add more, all in a world in which questions have a range of satisfactory answers and testing can establish a narrow yet valuable truth: “This one works.”


• In a recent Twitter Architecture it was observed how "Much can be implied by the implicit social contract when bidirectional follows don’t exist." To see this idea in action here are some very cool influencer maps. Identified are 6 types of social networks that are an overlay on Twitter's follower model: polarized networks, in-group networks, brand/public topic networks, bazaar networks, broadcast networks, and support networks.


• OK, this is funny: Nikola Tesla Pitching Silicon Valley VCs. It's a vision thing.


• Drew Crawford with a data filled 10K words on Why mobile web apps are slow. Huge discussion On HackerNews. Most interesting for me is that Apple pulled garbage collection out of OSX. I've done a lot of C++ programming in on-the-edge environments and I've never thought garbage collection a big win. With RAII resource management is while not easily achievable, programmers can make it work. What sucks in C++ is data corruption, which is nearly impossible to banish. Programmers can figure out how to manage memory easier that they can incant the garbage collector in to performing better.


• A simple and straightforward list - How to Scale: A Seven-Bullet Checklist:  Find your current processing ability and needs, and dig up any projected forecasts; Analyze the application-architecture in high-level; Find which components you can and need to scale, based on [1] and [2]; Analyze these application-component[s] in more detail; Deploy your application in the cloud; Start turning the knobs; Cloudify, if your application cannot walk the walk yet. 


• Is it time to come up with an HTTP replacement? It looks like with HTTP 2.0 the once simple thing that was HTTP may have jumped the shark and become something hideously complex. Varnish creator Poul-Henning Kamp says in Why HTTP/2.0 does not seem interesting: Overall, I don't see any of the three proposals offer anything that will make the majority of web-sites go "Ohh we've been waiting for that!" Bigger sites will be entised by small bandwidth savings, but the majority of the HTTP users will see scant or no net positive benefit if one or more of these three proposals were to become HTTP/2.0


• How Creative People In History Have Inspired Each Other. Kind of highlights why we all do this social network stuff and why it's not a complete waste of time. As self absorbed as we are, we are also not immune to creative influence.


• You gotta love the initiative: Rogue employee fired for turning game into Bitcoin mining colony. How much other stuff is stealthily doing the same for coining masters?


• Sean Hull with 3 simple patterns for tighter MySQL code: strip subqueries; unionize; don't use limit and offset for paging.


• BigCable is not your friend. What Happens When One Cable Rules Them All?: we’ll all be buying channels from our local cable guy in the form of IP packets, and the cable industry will pull off the unrestrained monetization of its long-ago sunk cost in installing local monopoly distribution networks. 


• Lots and lots of good suggestions. What are 10 algorithms one must know in order to solve most algorithm challenges/puzzles? I like this advice from Hadi Moshayedi: I also have teamed up with some of the strong guys before, I actually couldn't believe how simple their solutions looked like. So, I think its more about practicing and solving problems than learning new algorithms.


• Juggling multiple platforms and the bumpy road ahead. Looks like more and more crappy work for programmers making code work on our ever blossoming list of platforms. 


• When seen through a prism, by any measure, DuckDuckGo is blowing up, with traffic almost doubling.


• Instagram's Rick Branson on why Instagram went from Redis to Cassandra: Centralized logging, We have a high skew of writes to reads (1,000:1), Evergrowing data set, Needed durability. Also, Realtime analytics on Cassandra, videos from the 2013 Summit and Slides you shouldn’t miss from the Cassandra Summit.


• For you purists out there you can also host a static website on Google Cloud Storage. Maarten-Jan Kallen gives us a simple and clear guide.


• A scary how to programming a program to program money out of users: The Top F2P Monetization Tricks - use a premium currency; make spending money they only way to get ahead; give a really big reward and then threaten to take it away if money isn't spent; it takes money to make progress in the game; employ soft and hard boosts; spending more money means you win the game.


• With a new release of Akka adding cluster support the JVM is a strong competitor with Erlang/BEAM.  A definite win for distributed systems programmers.


• Quick how to by Nitin Kumar on configuring a web server to Improve Performance by caching and compression. Adds gzip and servlet caching. A commentor thinks caching is best when files are cached instead of executing PHP scripts and database queries.


• Where was the Bizaar when all this was happening? The NSA Has Inserted Its Code Into Android OS, Or Three Quarters Of All Smartphones. 


• Firewalls be damned, Designing a Network Protocol. Anthony Massa says with tight requirements toss out TCP/IP and grow your own Personal Area Network. It's not as hard as you might think and is actually common when you have to talk to a !Internet Thingy. Good discussion On Reddit. 


• Andrew Spyker has a set of Acme Air Links - Performance Sample/Benchmark showcasing Mobile and Cloud at Web Scale.