Tuesday
Feb192013

Sponsored Post: OLO, Amazon, Zoosk, aiCache, Teradata Aster, Aerospike, Percona, ScaleOut, New Relic, Logic Monitor, AppDynamics, ManageEngine, Site24x7

Who's Hiring?

  • OLO's food ordering platform powers some of the largest restaurant chains and feeds millions of consumers. We're looking for Senior C# Software Engineers and DevOps Engineers to help us scale our system. Apply 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.
  • Hiring! Director of Site Operations at Zoosk.  We’re looking for an innovator. Someone who wants to take site operations along with a smart team of Sys Admins to the next level. This is a very hands-on leadership role in a high-availability production environment. Full details here. 
  • Teradata Aster is looking for Distributed Systems, Analytic Applications,  and Performance Architects. As a member of the Architecture Group you will help define the technical roadmap for the product.
  • The New York Times is seeking a developer focused on infrastructure to join its newsroom development team. Read the full description here and send resumes to chadas@nytimes.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

Cool Products and Services

  • 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 20x 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...

Click to read more ...

Friday
Feb152013

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For February 15, 2013

Hey, it's HighScalability time: 

  • The Herokulypse. A cautionary tale of what can happen when scalability is left for later. Rap Genius created quite a stir (reddit, Hacker Newswhen they documented high costs ($20K/month for 15 million monthly uniques) and poor performance (6 second average response times) using Heroku's random routing mesh. The cause was tracked to queuing at the dyno level when the expectation was requests are routed to free dynos. Heroku admits this is a problem. So poor load balancing combined with RoR single threading = poor performance, one that adding more dynos and spending more money won't necessarily help. While it seems clear Heroku didn't make this aspect of their system crystal clear, the incident has generated a lot of teaching moments, if you slog through it all. This is a developing story.
  • You need money to feed the beast. Fred Wilson has some revenue ideas for you: Paid App Downloads - ex. WhatsApp; In-app purchases - ex. Zynga Poker; In-app subscriptions - ex. NY Times app; Advertising - ex. Flurry, AdMob; Digital-to-physical - ex. Red Stamp, Postagram; Transactions - ex Hailo. 

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

Click to read more ...

Thursday
Feb142013

When all the Program's a Graph - Prismatic's Plumbing Library

At some point as a programmer you might have the insight/fear that all programming is just doing stuff to other stuff.

Then you may observe after coding the same stuff over again that stuff in a program often takes the form of interacting patterns of flows.

Then you may think hey, a program isn't only useful for coding datastructures, but a program is a kind of datastructure and that with a meta level jump you could program a program in terms of flows over data and flow over other flows.

That's the kind of stuff Prismatic is making available in the Graph extension to their plumbing package (code examples), which is described in an excellent post: Graph: Abstractions for Structured Computation.

You may remember Prismatic from previous profile we did on HighScalability: Prismatic Architecture - Using Machine Learning On Social Networks To Figure Out What You Should Read On The Web. We learned how Prismatic, an interest driven content suggestion service, builds programs in terms of graph stuff:

Click to read more ...

Wednesday
Feb132013

7 Sensible and 1 Really Surprising Way EVE Online Scales to Play Huge Games

"Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult." -- Carl von Clausewitz

Games are proving grounds for software architecture. They combine scale, high performance, challenging problems, a rabid user base, cost sensitivity, and the need for profit. And when games have in-game currency, like EVE Online has, there's money at play, so you can't just get away with a c'est la vie attitude. Engineering must be applied. 

In Planning for war: how the EVE Online servers deal with a 3,000 person battle, we learn some techniques EVE Online uses to handle large games:

7 Sensible...

Click to read more ...

Monday
Feb112013

At Scale Even Little Wins Pay Off Big - Google and Facebook Examples

There's a popular line of thought that says don't waste time on optimization because developing features is more important than saving money. True, you can always add resources, but at some point, especially in a more mature part of a product lifecycle: performance equals $$$.

Two great examples of this evolution come from Facebook and Google. The upshot is that when you spend time and money on optimizing your tool chain you can get huge wins in performance, control, and costs. Certainly, don’t bother if you are just starting, but at some point you may want to switch to big development efforts in improving efficiency.

Facebook and HipHop

Click to read more ...

Friday
Feb082013

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For February 8, 2013

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

  • 34TB : storage for GitHub search; 2,880,000,000: log lines per day
  • Quotable Quotes:
    • @peakscale: The "IKEA effect"  << Contributes to NIH and why ppl still like IaaS over PaaS. :-\
    • @sheeshee: module named kafka.. creates weird & random processes, sends data from here to there & after 3 minutes noone knows what's happening anymore?
    • @sometoomany: Ceased writing a talk about cloud computing infrastructure, and data centre power efficiency. Bored myself to death, but saved others.

  • Lots of heat on Is MongoDB's fault tolerance broken? Yes it is. No it's not. YES it is. And the score: MongoDB Is Still Broken by Design 5-0.

  • Every insurgency must recruit from an existing population which is already affiliated elsewhere. For web properties the easiest group to recruit is the younger demographic. They naturally want something different than their elders and they have fewer allegiances to defend. What's your counter insurgency strategy?

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

Click to read more ...

Thursday
Feb072013

Ask HighScalability: Web asset server concept - 3rd party software available?

This article describes the idea of a website asset service for the author's dynamic websites. It deals as a request for comments and also as a request for hints to existing 3rd party software.

Click to read more ...

Wednesday
Feb062013

Super Bowl Advertisers Ready for the Traffic? Nope..It's Lights Out.

Advertising for the Super Bowl is bigger than the game for many viewers. So you gotta figure advertisers are ready for the traffic bursts generated by their expensive ads? Not exactly...

Yottaa reports an amazing 13 advertiser websites crashed during the Super Bowl. Coke was interactively au currant, asking viewers to vote for the ending of a commercial, but load times went to 62 seconds. SodaStream, Calvin Klein, Axe, Got Milk? The Walking Dead, many movie sites, and many car sites, all were flagged with delay of fame penalties.

Lots of time, money, and creative energy is spent lovingly perfecting every detail of these commercials. It won't be a surprise to any programmer that this can't usually be said of the follow through on the backend.

So what can you do? Yottaa has some good tips and Michael Hamrah has a wonderful post on dealing with the Super Bowl Burst Problem:

Click to read more ...

Tuesday
Feb052013

Ask HighScalability: Memcached and Relations

Hi everybody

I'm wondering what you would do: I develop a webapp using Grails, Memcached and Mysql as persistence. Now, I have following domain classes (simplified):

Product: Can be in one category
Category: Can have nested children, and have multiple products.

I need to access all product objects by id which led me to the idea to store all products in one big Memcached-entry with a key: PRODUCTMAP and as value, all product attributes as array, like: [productId1: [title: 'title'], productId2: [title: 'title']]

If I browse to category 4, I simply get my map categoryMap with value [cateoryId: [productId1, productId2]]
I also can list all products of a certain category by providing that id. 

The bad thing about this is that I always have to put back everything if I modify a single product.

Who can give advice how to realize that?
Any help will be appreciated! 

Thanks,

Best
Sullivan 

 

Tuesday
Feb052013

Sponsored Post: Amazon, Zoosk, aiCache, Teradata Aster, Aerospike, Percona, ScaleOut, New Relic, NetDNA, Logic Monitor, AppDynamics, ManageEngine, Site24x7

Who's Hiring?

  • 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.
  • Hiring! Director of Site Operations at Zoosk.  We’re looking for an innovator. Someone who wants to take site operations along with a smart team of Sys Admins to the next level. This is a very hands-on leadership role in a high-availability production environment. Full details here. 
  • Teradata Aster is looking for Distributed Systems, Analytic Applications,  and Performance Architects. As a member of the Architecture Group you will help define the technical roadmap for the product.
  • The New York Times is seeking a developer focused on infrastructure to join its newsroom development team. Read the full description here and send resumes to chadas@nytimes.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

Cool Products and Services

  • 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 20x faster than Cassandra, Couchbase and Mongodb. Read it now!
  • ScaleOut Software. In-memorry Data Grids for the Enterprise. Download a Free Trial.
  • NetDNA, a Tier-1 GlobalContent Delivery Network, offers a Dual-CDN strategy which allows companies to utilize a redundant infrastructure while leveraging the advantages of multiple CDNs to reduce costs.
  • 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...

Click to read more ...