Strategy
Amazon has a very will written account of their 8/8/2011 downtime: Summary of the Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, and Amazon RDS Service Event in the EU West Region. Power failed, backup generators failed to kick in, there weren't enough resources for EBS volumes to recover, API
Strategy
Dr. Daniel Abadi, author of the DBMS Musings blog and Cofounder of Hadapt, which offers a product improving Hadoop performance by 50x on relational data, is now taking his talents to graph data in Hadoop's tremendous inefficiency on graph data management (and how to avoid it), which shares
Strategy
With a new Planet of the Apes coming out, this may be a touchy subject with our new overlords, but Netflix is using a whole lot more trouble injecting monkeys to test and iteratively harden their systems. We learned previously how Netflix used Chaos Monkey, a tool to test failover
Strategy
For a long epoch there was a strategy of scaling up by making ever bigger super computers. I had the pleasure of programming on a few large massively multi-processor machines from SGI and DEC. Beautiful, highly specialized machines that were very expensive. These met the double-tap extinction event of Moore&
Strategy
In How to take advantage of Redis just adding it to your stack Salvatore 'antirez' Sanfilippo shows how to solve some common problems in Redis by taking advantage of its unique data structure handling capabilities. Common Redis primitives like LPUSH, and LTRIM, and LREM are used to accomplish
Strategy
If you are an insect, don't work at TripAdvisor, specialization is out. One of the most commented on strategies from the TripAdvisor architecture article is their rather opinionated take on the role of engineers in the organization. Typically engineers live in a box. They are specialized, they do
Strategy
Like a digital SWAT team that implodes the wrong door on a raid, the FBI seized multiple racks of computers from DigitalOne, these racks host websites from many clients that just happened to be in the same racks as whomever they are investigating. Downed sites include Instapaper, Curbed Network, and
Strategy
Planning your next buildout and thinking SSDs are still far in the future? Still too expensive, too low density. Hard disks are cheap, familiar, and store lots of stuff. In this short and entertaining video Wikia's Artur Bergman wants to change your mind about SSDs. SSDs are for
Strategy
There has been a lot of speculation over how Apple's iCloud would work. With the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference keynotes having just completed, we finally learned the truth. We can handle it. They made some interesting and cost effective architecture choices that preserved the value of their devices
Strategy
Who hasn't cursed their network for being slow while waiting for that annoying little hour glass of pain to release all its grains of sand? But what's really going on? Is your network really slow? PacketPushers Show 45 – Arista – EOS Network Software Architecture has a good
Strategy
Release early and often. A/B testing. Creating a landing page and buying ads on AdSense. All are ways of providing quick feedback in order to validate an idea. If you are like Zynga, with 250 million active users a month, how do you cost effectively prove out a game
Strategy
The most common complaint against NoSQL is that if you know how to write good SQL queries then SQL works fine. If SQL is slow you can always tune it and make it faster. A great example of this incremental improvement process was written up by StackExchange's Sam