Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For November 25, 2011

A HighScalability a day keeps the fail whale away.:

• 46 million turkeys eaten at Thanksgiving; Pinterest 421 million pageviews 
• Quotable quotes:
  • @al3xandr3 : scalability demands decoupling
  • @startupandrew : "Yesterday I did some digestive system scalability testing" -- in reference to eating 140 chicken nuggets
  • Peter Wayner : While the crazy dreamers can continue to craft NoSQL data stores, serious people will want to take a look at Oracle's version.
  • @weblearning : Unitil we get scalability - or that wonderful word massification - in education, we will not get value for money
  • Embrace and extend: @conor_omahony : IBM is Baking NoSQL Capabilities into DB2 and Informix. 
  • @GGopman : I look for scalability. That's what turns me on
• Supercomputing: An Industry in Need of a Revolution. Bartosz Milewski wants decently paying, interesting and meaningful jobs for all (supercomputer programmers). Get on that Santa.
• Caching and Tuning fun for high scalability. Wim Godden says If you're looking for a clear explanation about various caching techniques and tools like Memcached, Nginx and Varnish, as well as ways to deploy them in an efficient way, this talk is for you.
• Digital checklist for new house hunting: reliable power; good cell reception; fast internet. Should we add to that list local datacenter?  Amazon opens up a new datacenter in Oregon. Maybe we should have one in every pot?
• James Hamilton with a good summary of Global Netflix Platform: Large Scale Java PaaS Running on AWS.
• Building an Application upon Riak - Part 1. Kent Langley documents his experience using Riak in a new product. He breaks it up into: Making the Decision; Learning; Operating; Scaling; Mistakes. Summary: I love Riak overall and I would definitely use it again.  It's not easy and you really need to make sure the context is correct.
• The eldritch at Azul engage in A short conversation on Biased Locking. In the complex the simple often suffers.
• Side load may massively impact your MySQL Performance. Peter Zaitsev explains how loading a database server with a mix of workloads can lead to significant real world variance. On MySQL, changing your configuration can prevent a normally in memory workload  from becoming disk IO bound, which can slow performance down more than 100 times. 
• Scale up anyone? Fusion-io Delivers 10 Terabyte ioDrive Octal. 1.3 million IOPS with 6.7 GB/s bandwidth, up to 20 TB in a 1U server; use a single computer to process a graph with 68,719,000,000 nodes at 52.796 million traversed edges per second.
• Fun video explaining Hadoop using a kitchen metaphor. Not so sure the meal looked all that apetizing though.
• What may change everything? Important step toward computing with light and  Up To 30 Gbps: New Chip Enables Record-Breaking Wireless Data Transmission Speed. We are currently network limited and both these inventions could change that.
• Brent Ozar on SE Podcast #28 says the biggest performance fix is to think about why you need a query in the first place. Do all your drop down lists really need to hit the database?
• Building a NAS Server. Sblair with a great analyis of how to buid your own NAS using ZFS.
• Port of LevelDB to Java. More on LevelDB.
• Omid, a project whose goal is to add lock-free transactional support on top of HBase.
• Frenetic: A Programming Language for OpenFlow Networks. An interesting domain specific language embedded in python for programming OpenFlow networks in a purely functional style. It's hard to imagine this running at line speed, but the idea is cool.
• We hear almost nothing out of Apple, so when Ron Johnson shares What I Learned Building the Apple Store, it's worth a listen:  The challenge for retailers isn't "how do we mimic the Apple Store" or any other store that seems like a good model. It's a very different problem, one that's conceptually similar to what Steve Jobs faced with the iPhone. He didn't ask, "How do we build a phone that can achieve a two percent market share?" He asked, "How do we reinvent the telephone?" In the same way, retailers shouldn't be asking, "How do we create a store that's going to do $15 million a year?" They should be asking, "How do we reinvent the store to enrich our customers' lives?"