The high scalability community

Hi, First of all; thanks for a creating a GREAT resource on high scalability architecture. For us building high scalability solutions from the west coast of (tiny) Norway good input on the subject isn't always abundant. Which leads me to my next question; Are there any events or conferences on high scalability / SaaS in the US or internationally that any of you would recommend architects or data center managers to attend?

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Product: Hyperic

From Wikipedia: Hyperic HQ is a popular open source IT Operations computer system and network monitoring application software. It auto-discovers all system resources and their metrics, including hardware, operating systems, virtualization, databases, middleware, applications, and services. It watches hosts and services that you specify, alerting you when things go bad and again when they get better. It also provides historical charting and event correlation for faster problem identification. The Hyperic HQ server is a distributed J2EE application that runs on top of the open source JBoss Application Server. It is written in Java and portable C code and runs on Linux, Windows, Solaris, HP-UX and Mac OS X. Hyperic HQ Portal is a Java and AJAX User Interface that includes: * Inventory/Application Model & host hierarchy * Monitoring of network services (SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, ICMP, SNMP) * Monitoring of host resources (processor load, disk usage, system logs) * Remote monitoring supported through SSH or SSL encrypted tunnels. * Continuous Auto-Discovery of system resources including hardware, software and services * Track log & configuration data * Remote resource control for corrective actions such as starting and stopping services, vacuum database table, or snapshotting a VM * Ability to define event handlers to be run during service or host events for proactive problem resolution * Problem Resource Identification & Root Cause Analysis * Event Correlation * Alerting when service or host problems occur or get resolved via email, pager, Text messaging, RSS * Security/Access Control * Simple plug-in design that allows users to easily develop their own service checks depending on needs, by using the tools of choice (XML, J2EE, Bash, C++, Perl, Ruby, Python, PHP, C#, etc.) I met Javier Soltero, the CEO of Hyperic at the Velocity Web Performance and Operations dinner. I hit him with my best stuff and he didn't flinch a bit. Javier showed a deep understanding of the issues, a real passion for his product and the space, and the knowing good humor of someone who has been through a few wars and learned a little something along the way. I don' know if that translates to an excellent product, but it would at least make me take a look.

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Load Balancing of web server traffic

How to detect Congestion occurence in the network? Parameter of Load Balancer?

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Database People Hating on MapReduce

Update: Typical Programmer tackles the technical issues in Relational Database Experts Jump The MapReduce Shark. The culture clash is still what fascinates me. David DeWitt writes in the Database Column that MapReduce is a major step backwards:

A giant step backward in the programming paradigm for large-scale data intensive applications

A sub-optimal implementation, in that it uses brute force instead of indexing

Not novel at all -- it represents a specific implementation of well known techniques developed nearly 25 years ago

Missing most of the features that are routinely included in current DBMS

Incompatible with all of the tools DBMS users have come to depend on Listening to databasers and map reducers talk is like eavesdropping on your average family holiday mashup. Every holiday people who have virtually nothing in common are thrown together because they incidentally share a little DNA or are married to the shared DNA. In desperation everyone gravitates to some shared enemy they can all confidently bash. But after that moment is relieved and awkward silence once again looms, nothing is left but more drinking and tackling sensitive topics you just know will end badly. Database folks love their schemas, relational purity and their swiss army knife indexes. You soon learn that really map reduce is just another form of an index and indexes really can scale to any heights with just a little tweaking. Map reducers lover their pure functional models, their self-healing clustery filled ecosystems, and the shear joy of the semi-organized chaos of letting a 10,000 CPUs simultaneously bloom. I for one stand firmly by the relish tray. Transactions have a place and so does structured data. That's why Google contributes heavily to MySQL. Yet, I too like my map reduce engine, distributed file system combo platter. With map reduce I can implement any complex behavior over any data set. With enough machines that work can be performed in a predictable amount of time. You aren't limit to set logic, SQL types, and tweaked indexes. That's pretty good stuff too. Much like a staunchly conservative nail crunching father and his too soft pansy liberal son, these two camps will never understand each other. Every sign of beauty in one person's eyes is just another confirmation to the other side of impending senility. Why even try? Just hug in a manly way and agree to meet again next year.

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Moving old to new. Do not be afraid of the re-write -- but take some help

Recently I had to help users on one of my opensource project ISPMan. http://ispman.net This project started in 2001 as I was too unwilling to take care of the DNS and VitualHosting stuff as it was a side-thing to the company I worked for (so i wrote a software that took care of all these little details) Summary: A large project that needs a rewrite can be done in a matter of day. I will not give you a full case study about a project that went through a re-write but a case study about how easy it is to re-write something. Details: My boss was cool enough to let me open-source the project and obviously, I got a lot of cool-cred out of it. Later on I also did some support and implementation and earned quiet some money with it. Eventually I had to let the project go out of my hand to the community as I only did it to facilitate a job that wasnt williing to do. (Setup DNS zones of multiple servers, find out which host should host the website and put VirtualHost section there, find out which mail server should take care of the mailbox and create a mailbox, etc) The project was quiet successful and there are a number of users who are using it. One of the project members took himself to be the project manager and has been running the project since. I have been out of this project almost 5 years (not much time, I have had 2 kids 4.5 years and 8 months old, and my job was very demanding). The stress from my job has weakened a bit now (It took me really 3.5 years to bring them to a stable "actually an oxymoron when we are talking about high scalability" state). Back to the topic. We have had having complains about not having this feature and that for this opensource product. I tried to put in this feature... "I was the main authour. How complicated would it be for me to add this new feature.." and eventuall I went "What the ...". Yup, I hated my code, I hated everything about it. (as a programmer, as a sysadmin, as an op). Yes it was me coded it 7 years ago, it was me who insisted it to be like that... etc. But times have changes.. Its not 2001 any more. So I want to re-write it. Its not the first time that the idea of re-write was in place. Couple of years the senior members (any one who had to deal with the code) wanted to re-write. Its not extensible, its not pluggable, blah, blah, blah. Yup it was not written to do so. I was just written so I dont have to do the work which I did not wanted to and it served it welll... So if you want more extend it, re-write it, fork-it, you get my point (from the guy who wrote an app and opensourced it). I understand that point of view of the developers too "Why do I have to know how you LDAP scheme works, or how does Cyrus mail server works, etc" The re-write part: Using a PHP framework ( http://framework.zend.com ) ( something that almost did not exist in 2001 ) I was able to get something up and running in a couple of hours. http://ispdirector.net This whole thing was not possible without. * PHP5 (we moved from perl to php, in 2001 PHP was really Pretty Home Pages) * Zend framework ( opensource frameworks were scarce in 2001) * Some experience that LDAP as great it is, should not be where you put all your eggs This particular example does not say that perl(or any other language ) is bad and php is good or ldap(or any other directory) is bad and mysql is good , its just how we did it for this particuliar project. Oh and forgot about the "Get Some Help" Tellling your colleagues that they have to move to a new API can be more difficult then to hear a few blah and blah by the secreteries moved from XP to Vista This was about really moving from Perl to PHP, from PHP to Java, from Java to Perl, from Perl to Ruby. The whole point is that it does not matter. If you can do X faster than Y than I take you (In compute intensive scenario) If you do all your calculations this way, it might go somewhere.

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Strategy: Asynchronous Queued Virus Scanning

Atif Ghaffar has a nice strategy to deal with virus checking uploads:

Upload item into a safe area. If necessary, the uploader blocks waiting for a result.

Queue a work order into a job system so all the work can be distributed throughout your cluster.

A service in your cluster performs the virus scan and informs the uploader of the result.

Move the vetted item into your system. This removes the CPU bottleneck from your web servers and distributes it through your cluster. Keep your web servers providing prompt service to users. Let your cluster do the heavy lifting. This minimizes response time and maximizes throughput. A similar system can be used for creating thumbnails, transcoding, copyright checks, updating indexes, event notification or any other kind of intensive work.

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Does Sun Buying MySQL Change Your Scaling Strategy?

Sun is buying MySQL for $1 billion. The MySQL team has worked long and hard so I don't begrudge them their pay day. Strike while the iron is offering a lot of cash I say. And I have nothing against Sun. Yet I can't help but think this changes the mental calculation of what database to use. When Oracle acquired Innobase a new independent storage engine was needed for MySQL. How is this different? Does this change your thinking any? Would Martha say it's a good thing? Like Luke I've searched my feelings, but the force is not with me and I don't really know how I feel about it.

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Sun to Acquire MySQL

So what are we announcing today? That in addition to acquiring MySQL, Sun will be unveiling new global support offerings into the MySQL marketplace. We'll be investing in both the community, and the marketplace - to accelerate the industry's phase change away from proprietary technology to the new world of open web platforms. Read more on Jonathan Schwartz's Blog What do you think about this?

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OpenSpaces.org community site launched - framework for building scale-out applications

GigaSpaces launched OpenSpaces.org, a community web site for developers who wish to utilize and contribute to the open source OpenSpaces development framework. OpenSpaces extends the Spring Framework for enterprise Java development, and leverages the GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform (XAP) for data caching, messaging and as the container for application business logic. It is designed for building highly-available, scale-out applications in distributed environments, such as SOA, cloud computing, grids and commodity servers. OpenSpaces is widely used in a variety of industries, including financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing and retail -- and across the web in e-commerce, Web 2.0 applications such as social networking sites, search and more. OpenSpaces.org already lists more than two dozen projects submitted by the developer community, including GigaSpaces customers, partners and employees. Innovative projects include an instant messaging platform, integration with PHP, configuration via JRuby, an implementation of Spring Batch and a scalable dynamic RSS feed delivery system. GigaSpaces recently announced the OpenSpaces Developer Challenge, a developer competition with $25,000 in total prizes and a $10,000 grand prize. The prizes will be awarded to the most innovative applications built using the OpenSpaces framework or plug-ins that extend it. The Challenge deadline is April 2, 2008 and ‘early bird’ prizes are available for those who submit their concepts by February 13, 2008. Additionally, in November of 2007 GigaSpaces launched its Start-Up Program, which provides free software licenses for qualifying individuals and companies.

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Google Reveals New MapReduce Stats

The Google Operating System blog has an interesting post on Google's scale based on an updated version of Google's paper about MapReduce. The input data for some of the MapReduce jobs run in September 2007 was 403,152 TB (terabytes), the average number of machines allocated for a MapReduce job was 394, while the average completion time was 6 minutes and a half. The paper mentions that Google's indexing system processes more than 20 TB of raw data. Niall Kennedy calculates that the average MapReduce job runs across a $1 million hardware infrastructure, assuming that Google still uses the same cluster configurations from 2004: two 2 GHz Intel Xeon processors with Hyper-Threading enabled, 4 GB of memory, two 160 GB IDE hard drives and a gigabit Ethernet link. Greg Linden notices that Google's infrastructure is an important competitive advantage. "Anyone at Google can process terabytes of data. And they can get their results back in about 10 minutes, so they can iterate on it and try something else if they didn't get what they wanted the first time." It is interesting to compare this to Amazon EC2:

• $0.40 Large Instance price per hour x 400 instances x 10 minutes = $26.7
• 1 TB data transfer in at $0.10 per GB = $100

For a hundred bucks you could also process a TB of data!

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