Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For February 4, 2011

Submitted for your reading pleasure...

• Super Bowl Prediction: Pittsburgh 27, Green Bay 24. I'll be rooting for Green Bay, but the Pittsburgh defense will eventually win the day, beating back the fleet footed, quick tossing, and sharp shooting Aaron Rodgers. Roethlisberger will make exactly 3 plays that matter, but they'll be the right 3 plays.
• Reddit is now at 1 billion page views a month. Congratulations!
• Amazon S3 Cloud Stores 262 Billion Objects.  My god, it's full of stars...
• Quora’s Technology Examined by Phil Whelan. Excellent detective work answering the question: How Does Quora Work?
• Quotable Quotes:
  • @timoreilly: When hardware became commoditized, software was valuable. Now that software being commoditized, data is valuable. #strataconf
  • @coldfusionPaul: "Write someone a query, they'll go away for a day. Teach someone to query, they'll just go away." so, I use #NoSQL 555
  • @squarecog: To go *really* fast, you want to get rid of spokes in your wheels, and ditch tires. Also, turning is overrated. #nosql
• Relativistic statistical arbitrage. The speed of light is the new private wire. Recent advances in high-frequency financial trading have brought typical trading latencies below 500 s 1, at which point light propagation delays due to geographically separated information sources become relevant for trading strategies and coordination. Here we report a relativistic generalization of statistical arbitrage trading strategies 3–5 for space like separated trading locations.
• Capacity of Ad Hoc Wireless Networks. Looks like if you want to create an Internet that the government can't flip the Kill Switch on, the only problem will be bandwidth, there won't be enough. Early simulation experience with wireless ad hoc networks suggests that their capacity can be surprisingly low, due to the requirement that nodes forward each others’ packets.
• Esperwhispering: Using Esper to Find Problems in Real-time Data. Theo Schlossnagle of OmniTI talks about their cool tool for asking questions of a huge real-time event streams and getting the answers now!
• Why we’re using HBase: Part 1 by Cosmin Lehene. Scalability and performance “lured” us in. But in reality it’s the implementation that dictates costs, consistency, availability and performance. A good and scalable architecture is just a long term promise, unless it is backed up by the implementation.
• Google Presentation On Building A Content Delivery Network. Was an absolutely fascinating look at Google's challenges of scaling a CDN, talked about how peering fits in and what some of the trends in content delivery are today, and details on Google Global Cache. But Google apparently issued a take down notice and it is no more. Shame. We seldom get a good look into this shadowy part of the system.
• Designing for scalability on The Merbist. Designing beautiful and scalable software is hard. Really hard. I like the article because it goes  into design and not just strategies.
• Revving up a benchmark: from 626 to 74000 operations per second by Don Anderson.  For most problems, you want to go as fast as you can, with all the tools at your disposal. Rules or conventional wisdom should be questioned.
• Sergei Tsarev with MongoDB vs. Clustrix Comparison: Part 2. You shouldn't sacrifice these features in your application because you believe it's the only way to achieve good performance.
• Kent Langley takes a good shot at defining what that pesky cloud word really means. Today, in my opinion, the following “features” are required for something to really be cloud.  Each of these can be written about at length all over the internet.  But, it’s putting them together that creates the magic of the cloud.

Comments

[Phil Whelan]

Thanks for mention of my post, Todd. "Quora’s Technology Examined"

[HighScalability Team]

No problem Phil, it was very well done.

[HighScalability Team]

Well, I was in the right range on the score at least. Pittsburgh's defense didn't perform as expected, Rodgers did, and Roethlisberger only made 2 plays. That wasn't quite enough. Not counting that final drive, it was a pretty good game.

[mxx]

holy crap that Phil's Quora article is awesome. not because it's quora, I'm tired of hearing about it :), but because it talks about so many smart things. would be awesome to read an even more in-depth article about such setups.