Strategy
Pre-generating static files is an oldy but a goody, and as Thomas Brox Røst says, it's probably an underused strategy today. At one time this was the dominate technique for structuring a web site. Then the age of dynamic web sites arrived and we spent all our time
Strategy
One of the most popular and effective scalability strategies is to impose limits (GAE Quotas, Fotolog, Facebook) as a means of protecting a website against service destroying traffic spikes. Twitter will reportedly limit the number followers to 2,000 in order to thwart follow spam. This may also allow Twitter
Strategy
The primero recommendation for speeding up a website is almost always to add cache and more cache. And after that add a little more cache just in case. Memcached is almost always given as the recommended cache to use. What we don't often hear is how to effectively
Strategy
Given S3's recent failure (Cloud Status tells the tale) Kevin Burton makes the excellent suggestion of fronting S3 with a caching proxy server. A caching proxy server can reply to service requests without contacting the specified server, by retrieving content saved from a previous request, made by the
Strategy
Robert Scoble in an often poignant FriendFeed thread commiserating PodTech's unfortunate end, shared what he learned about creating a successful startup. Here's a summary of a Robert's rules and why Machiavelli just may agree with them: Have a story. Have everyone on board with
Strategy
Jeff Atwood started a barn burner of a conversation in Maybe Normalizing Isn't Normal on how to create a fast scalable tagging system. Jeff eventually asks that terrible question: which is better -- a normalized database, or a denormalized database? And all hell breaks loose. I know, it&
Product
ZooKeeper is a high available and reliable coordination system. Distributed applications use ZooKeeper to store and mediate updates key configuration information. ZooKeeper can be used for leader election, group membership, and configuration maintenance. In addition ZooKeeper can be used for event notification, locking, and as a priority queue mechanism. It&
Strategy
In the more cool stuff I've never heard of before department is something called Self Cleansing Intrusion Tolerance (SCIT). Botnets are created when vulnerable computers live long enough to become infected with the will to do the evil bidding of their evil masters. Security is almost always about
Strategy
If you've wondered why I haven't been posting lately it's because I've been on an amazing Beach's motorcycle tour of the Alps (and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and). My wife (Linda) and I rode two-up on a BMW
Strategy
Update 3: ReadWriteWeb says Google App Engine Announces New Pricing Plans, APIs, Open Access. Pricing is specified but I'm not sure what to make of it yet. An image manipulation library is added (thus the need to pay for more CPU :-) and memcached support has been added.
Strategy
Om proposes one solution to the Twitter Problem is to limit followers to three square meals a day. The reasonable idea being that lower limits should mean fewer scaling problems. And as a kicker raising those limits is a good way to raise much needed revenue. Scoble thinks users should
Strategy
High Performance Multithreaded Access to Amazon SimpleDB is a great follow up to the idea in How SimpleDB Differs from a RDBMS that more programming is the price paid for performance in SimpleDB. It shows how much work and infrastructure is required to batter better performance out of SimpleDB. Remember,