Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself - Avocado's 5 Early Stages of Architecture Evolution

In Don’t panic! Here’s how to quickly scale your mobile apps Mike Maelzer paints a wonderful picture of how Avocado, a mobile app for connecting couples, evolved to handle 30x traffic within a few weeks. If you are just getting started then this is a great example to learn from.

What I liked: it's well written, packing a lot of useful information in a little space; it's failure driven, showing the process of incremental change driven by purposeful testing and production experience; it shows awareness of what's important, in their case, user signup; a replica setup was used for testing, a nice cloud benefit. 

Their Biggest lesson learned is a good one:

It would have been great to start the scaling process much earlier. Due to time pressure we had to make compromises –like dropping four of our media resizer boxes. While throwing more hardware at some scaling problems does work, it’s less than ideal.

Here's my gloss on the article:

Evolution One - Make it Work

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NuoDB's First Experience: Google Compute Engine - 1.8 Million Transactions Per Second

This is a repost of the blog entry written by NuoDB's Tommy Reilly.  

We at NuoDB were recently given the opportunity to kick the tires on the Google Compute Engine by our friends over at Google. You can watch the entire Google Developer Live Session by clicking here.  In order to access the capabilities of GCE we decided to run the same YCSB based benchmark we ran at our General Availability Launch back in January. For those of you who missed it we demonstrated running the YCSB benchmark on a 24 machine cluster running on our private cloud in the NuoDB datacenter. The salient results were 1.7 million transactions per second with sub-millisecond latencies...

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Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For April 5, 2013

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

(Dr. Who Scaling Up the Shard click for cool animated gif)

• 50 sextillion: # of earth-like planets in universe; 100,000: stars
• Quotable Quotes:
  • @petdance: "I wish I had enough money to run Oracle instead of Postgres." "Why do you want to do that?" "I don't, I just wish I had enough money to."
  • @JBossMike: Java is old. Java is verbose. Java is boring. Java is dead… Java is FAST. 
  • @old_sound: We need a "shrink conf" for when scaling is not what we actually need.
  • Carsten Puls: At first, customers want to get going. Understanding what's going on under the hood isn't that important. As grows, want more control and go under the hood. Managing that balance through lifecycle is important.
  • @rbranson: What does almost every memcache library do during a multi-get when 1 out of 10 boxes times out? F*cking whole thing fails. < Reminded me of this
  • @heyavie: I wonder if King Kong's creators ever talked scalability?
  • arkitaip: It seems very risky to base your core business on a language that's only been around for two years. Sometimes web development seems to be more volatile than the fashion industry.
  • @_Mblueberries: I hate scaling and cleaning the fish.
  • @jcoglan: Reminder that 'scalability' is a property of system architecture and data layouts, not language runtimes (mostly)
  • @SuperLuckyHappy: Latest Headlines:  CIA: “Collect everything and hang on to it forever.” CIA Chief Technology Officer Big Data and Cloud Computing Pre
  • joelgrus: Finally, a way to combine the elegance of functional programming with the unwieldy, verbose syntax of Java!
  • The Archimedes Codex: The transition from the roll to the codex—the book format we know today—was a revolution in the history of data storage. The genius of the codex is that it contains knowledge not in two dimensions, like a roll, but in three. The roll has height and width; the codex has height, width, and depth. Because it has depth, it doesn’t need to be nearly as wide. A codex with 200 folios (400 pages), 6 inches wide, has the same potential data-storage area as a roll of the same height that is 200 feet long. To access data in a codex, you only have to travel through the depth dimension, which is just a couple of inches thick. 


• Custon Silcon + ZFS + Andy Bechtolsheim = DSSD, a chip startup to "improve the performance and reliability of flash memory for high performance computing, newer data analytics and networking." Pushing compute down to the edge, on to the disk, was long ago predicted by Jim Gray, who declared "locality is king" and "processors are going to migrate to where the transducers are." Sounds like DSSD is taking a shot at fulfilling Jim's vision. They are minimizing OS overhead, excellent. ZFS probably comes in because there's a long standing holy grail of implementing small fine grained objects in the file system, which is a performance nightmare, but extends the promise of doing away with the database layer. The gotcha with all these plays is commodity hardware. It's hard to maintain orders of magnitude performance gains over commodity players who are riding much cheaper cost curves and ever improving performance curves. Initial leads fade quickly and the capital costs keep rising. Sounds like there is a real software system's aspect here, so maybe that will decapitate those curves. In any case, it's great to see people developing hardware rather than staying mediocre with software.

Don't miss all that the Internet has to say on Scalability, click below and become eventually consistent with all scalability knowledge...

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Paper: A Web of Things Application Architecture - Integrating the Real-World into the Web

How do you layer a programmable Internet of smart things on top of the web? That's the question addressed by Dominique Guinard in his ambitious dissertation: A Web of Things Application Architecture - Integrating the Real-World (slides). With the continued siloing of content, perhaps we can keep our things open and talking to each other?

In the architecture things are modeled using REST, they will be findable via search, they will be social via a social access controller, and they will be mashupable. Here's great graphical overview of the entire system:

Abstract:

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5 Steps to Benchmarking Managed NoSQL - DynamoDB vs Cassandra

This is a guest post by Ben Bromhead from Instaclustr

Deciding to use a managed NoSQL datastore is a great step in ensuring you run a fast, scalable and resilient application without needing to be an expert in highly available architecture. How do you know which technology is the best for your application? How do you know whether the provider's performance claims are true? You are putting your application on someone else’s infrastructure and that requires some hard answers about their claims.

To determine the suitability of a provider, your first port of call is to benchmark. Choosing a service provider is often done in a number of stages. First is to shortlist providers based on capabilities and claimed performance, ruling out those that do not meet your application requirements. Second is to look for benchmarks conducted by third parties, if any. The final stage is to benchmark the service yourself.

In this article we will show you how to run some preliminary benchmarks against two managed NoSQL systems. For this test we will compare Instaclustr and Amazon DynamoDB using the Yahoo Cloud Serving Benchmark (YCSB). Instaclustr provides managed Apache Cassandra hosting and DynamoDB is Amazons own managed key value store solution...

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Sponsored Post: Rackspace, Simple, Fitbit, Amazon, Booking, aiCache, Aerospike, Percona, ScaleOut, New Relic, LogicMonitor, AppDynamics, ManageEngine, Site24x7

Who's Hiring?

• LogicMonitor is looking for a Front End developer to have a huge impact, be valued, realize their dreams, and help us realize ours. We are looking for someone to own the code that delivers the design and usability of LogicMonitor's enterprise SaaS application(s). Please apply online. 
• We need awesome people @ Booking.com - We want YOU! Come design next generation interfaces, solve critical scalability problems, and hack on one of the largest Perl codebases. Please apply online.
• Help build the platform that powers a better, fairer banking experience at Simple. Join a talented team that chooses its own tools; works across web, Android, iOS, and Ruby/Scala/Clojure backend apps; and develops a secure and scalable banking service on AWS. Learn more at careers.
• Fitbit is hiring a Site Operations Lead to help us on our mission to make the world a healthier place! Fitbit's wearable fitness devices are worn by people across the world, each syncing with the web site, wirelessly and automatically, every 15 minutes. Join our mission here!
• The AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) automates management of relational databases in the cloud. We have a wide variety of customers and are part of many mission-critical applications, like the ones built by the 2012 Obama re-election campaign. If you're interested in joining a fast-growing service and team, please send your resume to rds-jobs@amazon.com.
• New Relic is looking for a Java Scalability Engineer in Portland, OR. Ready to scale a web service with more incoming bits/second than Twitter?  http://newrelic.com/about/jobs
• Aerospike is Hiring! You dream in C - and like it? Then join us as a Senior Distributed Systems Engineer or Client / Application Engineer. People covent your bag of tricks for troubleshooting systems and network issues? Join our Operations and QA team. See if these positions are a fit for you! 

Fun and Informative Events

• It's back! Join the MySQL Community at the annual Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, April 22-25. This year's conference features an outstanding lineup of 92 speakers delivering 112 breakout sessions over three days! 

Cool Products and Services

• The Rackspace Cloud Application Programming Interface (API) has changed the game allowing customers to easily modify their cloud configuration with just a few lines of code.  Read about three of the most popular things that customers do with the Rackspace AP.
• aiCache creates a better user experience by increasing the speed scale and stability of your web-site. Test aiCache acceleration for free. No sign-up required. http://aicache.com/deploy
• New Benchmark shows Aerospike nearly 10x Faster than the Competition. Thumbtack Technology YCSB Benchmark shows Aerospike nearly 10x faster than Cassandra, Couchbase and Mongodb. Read it now!
• ScaleOut Software. In-Memory Data Grids for the Enterprise. Download a Free Trial.
• LogicMonitor - Hosted monitoring of your entire technology stack. Dashboards, trending graphs, alerting. Try it free and be up and running in just 15 minutes.
• AppDynamics is the very first free product designed for troubleshooting Java performance while getting full visibility in production environments. Visit http://www.appdynamics.com/free.
• ManageEngine Applications Manager : Monitor physical, virtual and Cloud Applications.
• www.site24x7.com : Monitor End User Experience from a global monitoring network.

If any of these items interest you there's a full description of each sponsor below. Please click to read more...

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Khan Academy Checkbook Scaling to 6 Million Users a Month on GAE

Khan Academy is a non profit company started by Salman Khan with the Big Hairy Audacious Goal of providing a free, world class education to anyone, anywhere, anytime. That’s a lot of knowledge. Having long been inspired and captivated by the Khan Academy, I was really curious to know how they plan to do it. Ben Kamens, lead developer at Khan Academy, gives the somewhat surprising answer in an interview: How to Scale your Startup to Millions of Users.

The short answer: develop a strong team, focus on features, let Google App Engine do the heavy lifting.

Some people seem to be turned off by all the GAE love in the interview. Part of it is that the interviewer is Fred Sauer, Developer Advocate for Google App Engine, so there’s a level of familiarity between the two. But the biggest part is simply that they really like GAE, for all the reasons your are supposed to like GAE. And that’s OK. In this day and age you are free to love whichever platform you choose.

Biggest surprise:

• A profile on 60 Minutes drove more traffic than TechChrunch, HackerNews, and everything else combined. Old media is not dead.

Part I liked the best:

• GAE is an abstraction over all the typical scalability issues and that let’s you focus on business problems. All abstractions leak, you are going to have to deal with problems no matter what you choose, but you are choosing the type of problems you want  to deal with by the platform you select. It's all about understanding the tradeoffs you're making.

Here’s my gloss on the major takeaways from the interview:

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Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For March 29, 2013

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

(Ukrainian daredevil scaling buildings)

• 44.6 billion - Tumblr posts; 300 Gb/s - DDoS DNS amplification attacks; 100 million - Eventbrite tickets processed.
• Quotable Quotes:
  • @tveskov: Alan Kay: “The past 30 years have been completely mundane. It’s all been scaling (of old technology) and Angry Birds” 
  • @phrawzty: OH "Complexity is accelerating. We must augment our ability to manage it." #monitorama
  • @stallent: new wave of apps that are bringing the server doing actual legit valuable work back into vogue know scaling is more than hard
  • @calvdee: Fending off a 300Gb/s DDoS attacks would constitute a feat of #highscalability 
  • @solarce: "A spider farted in Finland and screwed up my IOPS!" -- @lusis #monitorama
  • @cra: Listening to Shawn Pearce talk about scaling #git at Google with JGit... Android AOSP repos: 19.4GB, 2.5Mreq/day, 5.0TB/day #eclipsecon
  • @codemonkeyism: Sometime in the future Erlang people will realize scalability comes from async not actors and then hell freezes over.
• InfoQ in China has graciously offered to translate some of my articles into Chinese. So here's Iron.io Moved From Ruby to Go: 28 Servers Cut and Colossal Clusterf**ks Prevented in the original Chinese.


• To justify high margin devices you need user data to sync automagically between all devices a user owns, otherwise you would just leave everything on the cloud and stream it to much cheaper devices. But Apple is finding device syncing in a complex error prone world is not so simple: The promise of iCloud’s Core Data support is that it will solve all of the thorny issues of syncing a database by breaking up each change into a transaction log. Except it just doesn’t work. 


• Food trucks are the cloud of the restaurant world. Dream friendly, flexible hours, low startup costs, making good money requires selling alcohol, and you can just pack up and move whenever you want. Oh, well, maybe not.

Don't miss all that the Internet has to say on Scalability, click below and become eventually consistent with all scalability knowledge...

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The Changing Face of Scale - The Downside of Scaling in the Contextual Age

Robert Scoble is a kind of Brothers Grimm for the digital age. Instead of inspired romantics walking around the country side collecting the folk tales of past ages, he is an inspired technologist documenting the current mythology of startups.

One of the developments Robert is exploring is the rise of the contextual age. Where every bit of information about you is continually being prodded, pulled, and observed, shoveled into a great learning machine, and turned into a fully actionable knowledge graph of context. A digital identity more real to software than your physical body ever was. 

Sinner or saviour, the Age of Context has interesting implications for startups. It raises the entrance bar to dizzying heights. Much of the reason companies are tearing down the Golden Age of the Web, one open protocol at a time, is to create a walled garden of monopolized information.

To operate in this world you will have to somehow create a walled garden of your own. And it will be a damn big garden. So you must scale. Facebook and Google have an insane number of servers. Then you must gather to yourself the people capable of running these servers, creating the applications and cutting edge devices that tease out the data, store the data, learn from the data, and create a market for the data. A serious capital and technological barrier to entry. 

It's popular to say don't worry about scaling until you need to. It's a wonderful problem to have, etc. A curious aspect of these new contextual systems, Robert noticed, is that they need to plan on scale from the start. Not only must the infrastructure scale to gather and process context and turn it into smart data, the cost of each new customer is now huge.

One of the upsides of your typical software service is new customers are incrementally cheap to service, so they are highly profitable. The data is typically dead. It just sits in inexpensive storage and comes alive on demand, only when a user needs it. Economies of scale are your friend.

In the contextual age economies of scale are not your friend...

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AppBackplane - A Framework for Supporting Multiple Application Architectures

Hidden in every computer is a hardware backplane for moving signals around. Hidden in every application are ways of moving messages around and giving code CPU time to process them. Unhiding those capabilities and making them first class facilities for the programmer to control is the idea behind AppBackplane.

This goes directly against the trend of hiding everything from the programmer and doing it all automagically. Which is great, until it doesn't work. Then it sucks. And the approach of giving the programmer all the power also sucks, until it's tuned to work together and performance is incredible even under increasing loads. Then it's great.

These are two different curves going in opposite directions. You need to decide for your application which curve you need to be on.

AppBackplane is an example framework supporting the multiple application architectures we talked about in Beyond Threads And Callbacks. It provides a scheduling system that supports continuous and high loads, meets critical path timing requirements, supports fair scheduling amongst priorities; is relatively easy to program; and supports higher degrees of parallelism than can be supported with a pure tasking model.

It's a bit much for simple applications. But if you are looking to go beyond a basic thread per request model and think of an application as a container where a diverse set of components must somehow all share limited resources to accomplish work, then some of the ideas may prove useful.

In case you are still wondering where the name AppBackplane comes from, it's something I made up a while ago as a takeoff of computer backplane:

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