Strategy
If a large number of leaf node machines send requests to a central root node then that root node can become overwhelmed: * The CPU becomes a bottleneck, for either processing requests or sending replies, because it can't possibly deal with the flood of requests. * The network interface becomes
Strategy
How do you know which is the "best" design for a given problem? If, for example, you were given the problem of generating an image search results page of 30 thumbnails, would you load images sequentially? In parallel? Would you cache? How would you decide? If you could
Strategy
"I'll never need to scale so why bother? We aren't Twitter or Facebook or Google after all." This is the most common email I get, a question in the form of a thinly disguised rationalization for not having to worry about scaling. And in
Example
How do you keep a system small enough, while still being successful, that a simple scale-up strategy becomes the preferred architecture? StackOverflow, for example, could stick with a tool chain they were comfortable with because they had a natural brake on how fast they could grow: there are only so
Strategy
In 5 Lessons We’ve Learned Using AWS, Netflix's John Ciancutti says the best way to avoid failure is to fail constantly. In the cloud it's expected instances can fail at any time, so you always have to be prepared. In the real world we prepare
Strategy
In 5 Lessons We’ve Learned Using AWS, Netflix's John Ciancutti says one of the big lessons they've learned is to create less chatty protocols: In the Netflix data centers, we have a high capacity, super fast, highly reliable network. This has afforded us the luxury
Strategy
Good article from manageability.com summarizing design patterns from Pat Helland's amazing paper Life beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate's Opinion. 1. Entities are uniquely identified - each entity which represents disjoint data (i.e. no overlap of data between entities) should have a unique key. 2.
Strategy
Ricky Ho in Scalable System Design Patterns has created a great list of scalability patterns along with very well done explanatory graphics. A summary of the patterns are: 1. Load Balancer - a dispatcher determines which worker instance will handle a request based on different policies. 2. Scatter and Gather
Strategy
Google runs queries against thousands of in-memory index nodes in parallel and then merges the results. One of the interesting problems with this approach, explains Google's Jeff Dean in this lecture at Stanford, is the Query of Death. A query can cause a program to fail because of
Strategy
In a strange case of synchronicity, Google just published Instant Previews: Under the hood, a very well written blog post by Matías Pelenur of the Instant Previews team, giving some fascinating inside details on how Google implemented Instant Previews. It's syncronicty because I had just posted Strategy: Biggest
Strategy
Low Cost, High Performance, Strong Security: Pick Any Three by Chris Palmer has a funny and informative presentation where the main message is: reduce the size and frequency of network communications, which will make your pages load faster, which will improve performance enough that you can use HTTPS all the
Strategy
Facebook's Ryan Mack gave a MySQL Tech Talk where he talked about using what he called Non-stored Procedures for adding edges to Facebook's social graph. The question is: how can edges quickly be added to the social graph? The answer is ultimately one of deciding where