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Amazon created a whole new class of service with their Provisioned IOPS for RDS, EBS, and DynamoDB. The idea is simple. If you want more performance, you turn a dial up. If you want less, you turn a dial down. A beautifully simple model. You pay for the performance you
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Performance guru Steve Souders gave his keynote presentation, Cache is King! (slides), at the HTML5DevCon, besides being an extremely clear explanation of how caching works on the Internet and how to optimize your use of HTTP to get the best performance, Steve ran experiments that found some surprising results on
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Ivan Pepelnjak, in his short and information packed REDUNDANT DATA CENTER INTERNET CONNECTIVITY video, shows why networking as played at the highest levels is something you want to leave to professionals, like a large animal country vetenarian delivering a stuck foal at 2AM on a dark and stormy night. There
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Imagine if you will that car rental agencies rented cars like programmers are hired at many software companies... Agency : So sorry you had to wait in the reception area for an hour. Nobody knew you were coming to today. I finally found 8 people to interview before we can rent
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Colin Scott, a Berkeley researcher, updated Jeff Dean’s famous Numbers Everyone Should Know with his Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know interactive graphic. The interactive aspect is cool because it has a slider that let’s you see numbers back from as early as 1990 to the far far
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I love it when a somewhat older article like Pinterest Cut Costs From $54 To $20 Per Hour By Automatically Shutting Down Systems hits Hacker News and generates a good conversation. One of the common sentiments about the cloud was raised: why doesn't Pinterest save a lot of
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A big part of engineering for a quality experience is bringing in the long tail. An improbable severe failure can ruin your experience of a site, even if your average experience is quite good. That's where building for resilience comes in. Resiliency used to be outside the realm
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It's a little known fact that Santa Clause was an early queue innovator. Faced with the problem of delivering a planet full of presents in one night, Santa, in his hacker's workshop, created a Present Distribution System using thousands of region based priority present queues for
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We've long known one of the virtues of the cloud is, through the magic of services and automation, that systems can be shut or tuned down when not in use. What may be surprising is how much money can be saved. This aspect of cloudiness got a lot
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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. Why flash rules for databases The economics of flash memory are staggering. If you’re not using SSD, you are
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With cloud SLAs generally being worth what you don't pay for them, what can you do to protect yourself? Sean Hull in AirBNB didn’t have to fail has some solid advice on how to deal with outages: 1. Use Redundancy. Make database and webserver tiers redundant using
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Rodrigo Campos shared some interesting benchmark results for AWS instances in the South America Region (São Paulo) and US East Region (North Virginia). He summarized the results in this thread on the Guerrilla Capacity Planning list: * The same instance type shows a different behavior depending on the region that it