Strategy
The title of this post is a quote from Ilya Grigorik's post Weak Consistency and CAP Implications. Besides the article being excellent, I thought this idea had something to add to the great NoSQL versus RDBMS debate, where Mike Stonebraker makes the argument that network partitions are rare
Strategy
Robert Johnson, a director of engineering at Facebook, celebrated Facebook's monumental achievement of reaching 500 million users by sharing the scaling principles that helped reach that milestone. In case you weren't suitably impressed by the 500 million user number, Robert ratchets up the numbers game with
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Should you pay more in the cloud or pay less for bare metal in the datacenter? This is a crucial decision point facing startups today. Which way should you go? In this Webpulp.tv interview, Joe Stump, always a go-to guy when you need a metric ass-ton (a favorite expression
Strategy
At Monday's Cloud Computing Meetup, Paco Nathan gave an excellent Getting Started on Hadoop talk (slides). I found one of Paco's strategies particularly interesting: consider when a service starts charging in cost calculations. Depending on your use case it may be cheaper to go with a
Strategy
DynaTrace in Top 10 Performance Problems taken from Zappos, Monster, Thomson and Co, has provided a useful compilation of performance problems, with potential solutions, that they've found while working with their clients. 1. Too Many Database Calls - too many database query per request/transaction. 2. Synchronized to
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A firestorm of accusations circled around recently saying that Cassandra, the elected-by-major-adopters emperor of the NoSQL movement, has no clothes. It was said Twitter was dumping Cassandra; Reddit outages were linked to Cassandra; and even Facebook, Cassandra's cradle of birth, was said to have abandoned Cassandra. Shouts of
Strategy
Professor Lance Fortnow, in his blog post Drowning in Data, says complexity has taught him this lesson: When storage is expensive, it is cheaper to recompute what you've already computed. And that's the world we now live in: Storage is pretty cheap but data acquisition and
Strategy
Aditya Agarwal, Director of Engineering at Facebook, gave an excellent Scale at Facebook talk that covers their architecture, but the talk is really more about how to scale an organization by preserving the best parts of its culture. The key take home of the talk is: You can get the
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Isn't the secret to fast, scalable websites to cache everything? Caching, if not the secret sauce of many a website, is it at least a popular condiment. But not so fast says Peter Zaitsev in Beyond great cache hit ratio. The point Peter makes is that we read
Strategy
The idea came up in this Hacker News thread, commenting on a 37signals interview, that having three system administrators is the minimum optimal number of admins. Everyone wants to lower their costs by having each admin administer a lot of machines. The problem is when you have fewer than three
Strategy
In Scaling writes in MySQL (slides) Philip Tellis, while working for Yahoo, describes how using time based partitions they were able to increase their write capability from 2100 inserts per second (7 million a day) to a sustained 8500 inserts per second (734 million a day). This was capacity enough
Strategy
Vaibhav Puranik in Web serving in the cloud – our experiences with nginx and instance sizes describes their experience trying to maximum traffic and minimum their web serving costs on EC2. Initially they tested with two m1.small instance types and then they the switched to two c1.mediums instance types.