CDN
You go through the expense of installing CDNs all over the globe to make sure users always have a node close by and you notice something curious and furious: clients still experience poor latencies. What's up with that? What do you do to find the problem? If you
Example
Tim Bray has a wonderful interview with Casey Forbes, creator of Ravelry, a Ruby on Rails site supporting a 400,000+ strong community of dedicated knitters and crocheters. Casey and his small team have done great things with Ravelry. It is a very focused site that provides a lot of
hot links
Save 25% on Hadoop Conference Tickets Apache Hadoop is a hot technology getting traction all over the enterprise and in the Web 2.0 world. Now, there's going to be a conference dedicated to learning more about Hadoop. It'll be Friday, October 2 at the Roosevelt
Paper
We've seen a lot of NoSQL action lately built around distributed hash tables. Btrees are getting jealous. Btrees, once the king of the database world, want their throne back. Paul Buchheit surfaced a paper: A practical scalable distributed B-tree by Marcos K. Aguilera and Wojciech Golab, that might
Strategy
A user named Apathy on how Reddit scales some of their features, shares some advice he learned while working at Google and other major companies. To be fair, I [Apathy] was working at Google at the time, and every job I held between 1995 and 2005 involved at least one
resource management
GridwiseTech has developed AdHoc, an advanced framework for sharing geographically distributed data and compute resources. It simplifies the resource management and makes cooperation secure and effective. The premise of AdHoc is to enable each member of the associated institution to control access to his or her resources without an IT
Product
Infinispan is a highly scalable, open source licensed data grid platform in the style of GigaSpaces and Oracle Coherence. From their website: The purpose of Infinispan is to expose a data structure that is highly concurrent, designed ground-up to make the most of modern multi-processor/multi-core architectures while at the
hot links
A tour through hybrid column/row-oriented DBMS schemes by DANIEL ABADI. Approaches: PAX, Fractured Mirrors, and Fine-grained hybrids. The Future of Database Clustering by ROBERT HODGES. Simple management and monitoring, Fast, flexible replication, Top-to-bottom data protection, Partition management, Cloud and virtualized operation, Transparent application access, Open source. Some perspective to
Example
I first heard an enthusiastic endorsement of Squarespace streaming from the ubiquitous Leo Laporte on one of his many Twit Live shows. Squarespace as a fully hosted, completely managed environment for creating and maintaining a website, blog or portfolio was of interest to me because they promise scalability and this
Strategy
Solve only 80% of a problem. That's usually good enough and you'll not only get done faster, you'll actually have a chance of getting done at all. This strategy is given by Amix in HOW TWITTER (AND FACEBOOK) SOLVE PROBLEMS PARTIALLY. The idea is
hot links
I'm Going To Scale My Foot Up Your Ass - Shut up about scalability, no one is using your app anyway. Multi-Tenant Data Architecture - Microsoft's take on different approaches to multitenancy. Cloud computing rides on spiraling Energy costs - A report by US researchers has
Example
Update: Streamy Explains CAP and HBase's Approach to CAP. We plan to employ inter-cluster replication, with each cluster located in a single DC. Remote replication will introduce some eventual consistency into the system, but each cluster will continue to be strongly consistent. Ryan Barrett, Google App Engine datastore
Strategy
We've referenced this 189 slide masterpiece by Ask Bjorn Hansen before, but it was hidden without its own first class link. He describes his presentation as 3 hours of 5 minute lightening talks and that sounds about right. The presentation covers: overall platform and architecture considerations involved in
Example
ThePort Network's Director of Engineering, TJ Muehleman was kind of enough to share some of the architectural details for their white label social media system. It currently runs about 50 social networks varying in size from less than 1000 members to more than 300,000 members, all on
Product
One of the top recommendations from the collective wisdom contained in Real Life Architectures is to add monitoring to your system. Now! Loud is the lament for not adding monitoring early and often. The reason is easy to understand. Without monitoring you don't know what your system is
Strategy
AFK Partners has release what they feel are the Best Practices for Scalability: 1. Asynchronous - Use asynchronous communication when possible. 2. Swim Lanes – Create fault isolated “swim lanes” of hardware by customer segmentation. 3. Cache - Make use of cache at multiple layers. 4. Monitoring - Understand your application’