Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For March 18, 2011

Submitted for your reading pleasure on this day of wind and rain...

• The cloud is falling. Or at least shared networked storage as Reddit has a couple of long periods of downtime. Good write up at Why reddit was down for 6 of the last 24 hours. Upshot: Reddit is moving off EBS to local disks.
• Quotable Quotes:
  • @thomleggett: 32 or so joins - the sweet-spot of suck for MySQL - @emileifrem #nosql #neo4j #qconlondon
  • @jkalucki: The [Twitter] Streaming API pushes 100MB in less than a second.
  • @LusciousPear: Finding the true test of a DB is recovery when things go wrong, not "who's most web-scale" on paper #nosql
  • @TimelessP: Functionality, scalability, security... pick two.
  • @beaknit: #ccevent #nosql @adrianco: A year from oracle to simpledb. A week from simpledb to cassandra. Mental shift biggest hurdle.
• Heather Willems captured this very cool Ogilvy Note, which is a visual representation of a panel talk on Scalability: Covering Your Rear with a Good Backend at SXSWi. It captures in cartoon like drawing the major ideas in the talk and their relationships. Definitely a different way of looking at things. 
• The price of bandwidth continues to fall, especially for those who can take advantage of the economies of scale. Dan Rayburn says two years ago, Netflix paid about five cents to stream a movie and today, pays about two and half cents. Netflix will only spend $50 million on CDNs in 2011. Any wonder everyone wants to stream some form of content these days?
• Google Tech Talk: Re-Configurable EXASCALE Computing,  Steven J Wallach, Convey Computer Corp. This presentation is focused on increasing uni-processor performance and the roles played by application specific heterogeneous computing and compilers in evolving processor architecture. Obviously knowledegable and interesting speaker. 
• The driver for Moore's Law is Rock's Law: the cost of a semiconductor chip fabrication plant doubles every four years. 
• For the cold war version of the iPad take a look at this amazing 1953 Navy Film Series On Mechanical Computers.
• Today's Quora: What's the best database to store (potentially) millions of small binary data?
• Today's Stackoverflow: What scalability problems have you solved using a NoSQL data store?
• Scaling Up or Scaling Out? Part Two. Brent Ozar with two great articles on how SQL Server fits in a scale-up and a scale-out strategy. Dissect our data into different types, start exploring the needs of each type, and stay completely honest with ourselves. Brent has another wonderful article at RAID 0 SATA with 2 Drives: It’s Web Scale!
• Royal Pindom puts together The Big Data Cookbook. While not an Iron Chef candidate,  there's a good overview of the current products for file systems, databases, data analysis, event processing, and more.
• Memristors in the news, solving mazes: The maze is solved in a massively parallel way, since all memristors in the network participate simultaneously in the calculation. Very cool. 
• Classic paper from James Hamilton: On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services. This paper summarizes a set of best practices for designing and developing operations-friendly services.
• Listing All Maximal Cliques in Large Sparse Real-World Graphs by David Eppstein and Darren Strash. Doing stuff with big data. This is the first algorithm to offer a practical solution to listing all maximal cliques in large sparse graphs.
• SINFONIA: A NEW PARADIGM FOR BUILDING SCALABLE DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS. Someone is always trying to get rid of messages, this is an interesting attempt: We propose a new paradigm for building scalable distributed systems. Our approach does not require dealing with message-passing protocols—a major complication in existing distributed systems. Instead, developers just design and manipulate data structures within our service called Sinfonia. 
• GoGrid and Amazon EC Cloud Servers compare. Something we don't see enough of, a detailed comparison between the two clouds. It all depends, of course...