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In a paper delivered at HotCloud '12 by a group from CMU and Intel Labs, Saving Cash by Using Less Cache (slides, pdf), they show it may be possible to use less DRAM under low load conditions to save on operational costs. There are some issues with this idea,
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If you like the idea of exploiting market inconsistencies to lower your costs then you will love this paper and video from the Hot Cloud '12 conference: Exploiting Hardware Heterogeneity within the Same Instance Type of Amazon EC2. The conclusion is interesting and is a source of good guidance:
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In a really far ranging and insightful interview by Steve Peterson: Game Industry Legends: Rob Pardo, where the future of gaming is discussed, there was a section on how the cloud might be used in games. I know there are a lot of game developers in my audience, so I
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Salvatore Sanfilippo wrote a response to Michel Martens' An Open Minded Reader. There's nothing in the post or response that's controversial. I was just struck at what a clear explication the conversation was on all the effort that goes into optimizing read paths. We optimize
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Update: More background by Ikai Lan, who worked on the mobile server team at LinkedIn, says some facts were left out: the app made "a cross data center request, guys. Running on single-threaded Rails servers (every request blocked the entire process), running Mongrel, leaking memory like a sieve."
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Google recently released a paper on Spanner, their planet enveloping tool for organizing the world’s monetizable information. Reading the Spanner paper I felt it had that chiseled in stone feel that all of Google’s best papers have. An instant classic. Jeff Dean foreshadowed Spanner’s humungousness as early
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Nothing shows how much software architectures have changed than the intelligent scheduling of computation over differently priced compute resources. This isn't just a false economy either. Vimeo saves up to 50% on their video transcoding bill by intelligently playing the spot, reserved, and on-demand markets. If you are
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If you are looking for an excellent overview of general architecture principles then take a look at Will Larson's Introduction to Architecting Systems for Scale. Based on his experiences at Yahoo! and Digg, Will covers key concepts in some depth. A quick gloss on the building blocks: 1.
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Facebook made quite a splash when they released their native iOS app, not because of their app per se, but because of their conclusion that their biggest mistake was betting on HTML5, so they had to go native. As you might imagine this was a bit like telling a Great
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This is a guest post from Per Buer, founder and CEO of Varnish Software, provider of Varnish Cache, an open source web application accelerator freely available at varnish-cache.org. Varnish powers a lot of really big websites worldwide. We at Varnish Software are all about speed. Varnish Cache is built
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My name is Russell Sullivan, I am the author of AlchemyDB: a highly flexible NoSQL/SQL/DocumentStore/GraphDB-datastore built on top of redis. I have spent the last several years trying to find a way to sanely house multiple datastore-genres under one roof while (almost paradoxically) pushing performance to its
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One consequence of IT standardization and commodification has been Google’s datacenter is the computer view of the world. In that view all compute resources (memory, CPU, storage) are fungible. They are interchangeable and location independent, individual computers lose identity and become just a part of a service. Thwarting that