Strategy
In Resolved: Widespread Application Outage, Heroku tells their story of how they dealt with the Amazon outage. While taking 100% responsibility for the downtime, they also shared a number of the strategies they used to bring their service back to full working order. One of Heroku's most interesting
Strategy
This is a hilarious presentation by Josh Berkus, called Scale Fail, given at O'Reilly MySQL CE 2011. Josh is entertaining, well spoken, and cleverly hides insight inside chaos. And he makes some dang good points along the way. Josh has a problem, you see Josh has learned how
Strategy
Using this strategy, Valyala, a commenter on Are Long VM Instance Spin-Up Times In The Cloud Costing You Money?, was able to reduce their GAE application start-up times from 15 seconds down to to 1.5 seconds: Spin-up time for newly added Google AppEngine instances can be reduced using initial
Strategy
You might have consistency problems if you have: multiple datastores in multiple datacenters, without distributed transactions, and with the ability to alternately execute out of each datacenter; syncing protocols that can fail or sync stale data; distributed clients that cache data and then write old back to the central store;
Strategy
A surprising amount of heat and light was generated by the whole Micrsoft vs MySpace discussion. Why people feel so passionate about this I'm not quite sure, but fortunately for us, in the best sense of the web, it generated an amazing number of insightful comments and observations.
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With the Chapultepec aqueduct, also named the great aqueduct, the Aztecs built a novel uninterruptible water supply for providing fresh water to Tenochtitlan, their fast growing jewel of a capital city. A section of the aqueduct is still around today: It's fun to think about how even 600
Strategy
In Stack Overflow Architecture Update - Now At 95 Million Page Views A Month, a commenter expressed surprise about Stack Overflow's backup strategy: Backup is to disk for fast retrieval and to tape for historical archiving. The comment was: Really? People still do this? I know some organizations
Strategy
Dropbox saves one million files every 15 minutes, more tweets than even Twitterers tweet. That mind blowing statistic was revealed by Rian Hunter, a Dropbox Engineer, in his presentation How Dropbox Did It and How Python Helped at PyCon 2011. The first part of the presentation is some Dropbox lore,
Strategy
This strategy targets reducing the amount of protocol data in packets by sending only the attributes that are needed. Google calls this Partial Response and Partial Update. Netflix posted about adopting this strategy in their recent Netflix API redesign. We've seen previously how Netflix improved performance by creating
Strategy
MySQL Expert Ronald Bradford explains how one key way to improve the scalability of a MySQL server, and undoubtedly nearly every other server, is to eliminate unnecessary SQL, saying the most efficient way to improve an SQL statement is to eliminate it: The MySQL kernel can only physically process a
Strategy
"For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them." -- Aristotle A really nice Internet moment happened in the HackerNews thread Disqus: Scaling the World’s Largest Django Application, when David Kitchen crafted an awesome response to a question about
Example
This is an interview with Wade Simmons, an Infrastructure Engineer at SimpleGeo, a service making it easy for developers to create location-aware applications, on their increasing use of Node.js as a backend service component, replacing code that would have at one time been written in Java, Python or Ruby.