Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For April 3rd, 2015

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

Luscious SpaceX photos have been launched under Creative Commons.

• 1,000: age of superbug treatment; 18 million: number of laws in the US
• Quotable Quotes:
  • @greenberg: Only in the Bay Area would you find a greeting card for closing a funding round.
  • @RichardWarburto: "Do Not Learn Frameworks. Learn the Architecture"
  • Alex Dzyoba: Know your data and develop a simple algorithm for it.
  • @BenedictEvans: Akamai: 17% of US mobile connections are >4 Mbps. Most of the rest of the developed world is over 50%
  • Linus: Linux is just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like GNU
  • jhugg: This just lines up with what we've seen in the KV space over the last 5 years. Mutating data and key-lookup are all well and good, but without a powerful query language and real index support, it's much less interesting.
  • Facebook: Whatever the scale of your engineering organization, developer efficiency is the key thing that your infrastructure teams should be striving for. This is why at Facebook we have some of our top engineers working on developer infrastructure.
  • mysticreddit: Micro-optimization is a complete waste of time when you haven't spent time focusing on the meta & macro optimization
  • @adriancolyer: If you think cross-partition transactions can't scale, it's well worth taking a look at the RAMP model: 
  • @jasongorman: Microservices are a great solution to a problem you probably don't have
  • @dbrady: If 1 service dies and your whole system breaks, you don't have SOA. You have a monolith whose brain has been chopped up and stuck in jars.


• Fascinating realization. We live in a world in which every tech interaction is subject to a man-in-the-middle attack. Future Crimes: All of this is possible because the screens on our phones show us not reality but a technological approximation of it. Because of this, not only can the caller ID and operating system on a mobile device be hacked, but so too can its other features, including its GPS modules. That’s right, even your location can be spoofed.


• That's every interaction. Pin-pointing China's attack against GitHub: The way the attack worked is that some man-in-the-middle device intercepted web requests coming into China from elsewhere in the world, and then replaced the content with JavaScript code that would attack GitHub. 


• Messaging and mobile platforms: If you take all of this together, it looks like Facebook is trying not to compete with other messaging apps but to relocate itself within the landscape of both messaging and the broader smartphone interaction model. 


• Martin Thompson: Love the point that the compiler can only solve problems in the 1-10% problem space. The 90% problem space is our data access which is all about data structures and algorithms. The summary is he shows how instruction processing can be dwarfed by cache misses. This resonates for me with what I've seen in the field with customers in the high-performance space. Obvious caveat is applications where time is dominated by IO.

Don't miss all that the Internet has to say on Scalability, click below and become eventually consistent with all scalability knowledge (which means this post has many more items to read so please keep on reading)...

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6 Ways to Defeat the Coming Robot Army Swarms

Phalanx Weapon System by EumenesOfCardia

For every new weapon there’s an often unexpected move made to counter it. You develop a rock, I develop a shield. You develop a castle, I develop a cannon. You develop a knight in shining armor, I develop a long bow. You develop nukes and I go MAD. You develop a hacker army, I corrupt technology.

You develop a swarming robot army, what do I do?

To answer that question Paul Scharre over on the War on the Rocks blog has written a mesmerizing 6 part series of articles on robotic swarm warfare (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, Counter-Swarm: A Guide to Defeating Robotic Swarms).

But first, let’s set up the fear part of the article.

War Has Gone Open-Source

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Sponsored Post: MongoDB, Aerospike, Nervana, SignalFx, InMemory.Net, Couchbase, VividCortex, Transversal, MemSQL, Scalyr, AiScaler, AppDynamics, ManageEngine, Site24x7

Who's Hiring?

• At Scalyr, we're analyzing multi-gigabyte server logs in a fraction of a second. That requires serious innovation in every part of the technology stack, from frontend to backend. Help us push the envelope on low-latency browser applications, high-speed data processing, and reliable distributed systems. Help extract meaningful data from live servers and present it to users in meaningful ways. At Scalyr, you’ll learn new things, and invent a few of your own. Learn more and apply.


• Nervana Systems is hiring several engineers for cloud positions. Nervana is a startup based in Mountain View and San Diego working on building a highly scalable deep learning platform on CPUs, GPUs and custom hardware. Deep Learning is an AI/ML technique breaking all the records by a wide-margin in state of the art benchmarks across domains such as image & video analysis, speech recognition and natural language processing. Please apply here and mention “highscalability.com” in your message.


• Linux Web Server Systems Engineer – Transversal. We are seeking an experienced and motivated Linux System Engineer to join our Engineering team. This new role is to design, test, install, and provide ongoing daily support of our information technology systems infrastructure. As an experienced Engineer you will have comprehensive capabilities for understanding hardware/software configurations that comprise system, security, and library management, backup/recovery, operating computer systems in different operating environments, sizing, performance tuning, hardware/software troubleshooting and resource allocation. Apply here.


• UI Engineer– AppDynamics, founded in 2008 and lead by proven innovators, is looking for a passionate UI Engineer to design, architect, and develop our their user interface using the latest web and mobile technologies. Make the impossible possible and the hard easy. Apply here.


• Software Engineer - Infrastructure & Big Data – AppDynamics, leader in next generation solutions for managing modern, distributed, and extremely complex applications residing in both the cloud and the data center, is looking for a Software Engineers (All-Levels) to design and develop scalable software written in Java and MySQL for backend component of software that manages application architectures. Apply here.

Fun and Informative Events

• MongoDB World brings together over 2,000 developers, sysadmins, and DBAs in New York City on June 1-2 to get inspired, share ideas and get the latest insights on using MongoDB. Organizations like Salesforce, Bosch, the Knot, Chico’s, and more are taking advantage of MongoDB for a variety of ground-breaking use cases. Find out more at http://mongodbworld.com/ but hurry! Super Early Bird pricing ends on April 3.

Cool Products and Services

• Looking for a scalable NoSQL database alternative? Aerospike is validating the future of ACID compliant NoSQL with our open source Key-Value Store database for real-time transactions. Download our free Community Edition or check out the Trade-In program to get started. Learn more.


• SignalFx: just launched an advanced monitoring platform for modern applications that's already processing 10s of billions of data points per day. SignalFx lets you create custom analytics pipelines on metrics data collected from thousands or more sources to create meaningful aggregations--such as percentiles, moving averages and growth rates--within seconds of receiving data. Start a free 30-day trial!


• InMemory.Net provides a Dot Net native in memory database for analysing large amounts of data. It runs natively on .Net, and provides a native .Net, COM & ODBC apis for integration. It also has an easy to use language for importing data, and supports standard SQL for querying data. http://InMemory.Net


• Top Enterprise Use Cases for NoSQL. Discover how the largest enterprises in the world are leveraging NoSQL in mission-critical applications with real-world success stories. Get the Guide.
  http://info.couchbase.com/HS_SO_Top_10_Enterprise_NoSQL_Use_Cases.html


• VividCortex goes beyond monitoring and measures the system's work on your MySQL and PostgreSQL servers, providing unparalleled insight and query-level analysis. This unique approach ultimately enables your team to work more effectively, ship more often, and delight more customers.


• MemSQL provides a distributed in-memory database for high value data. It's designed to handle extreme data ingest and store the data for real-time, streaming and historical analysis using SQL. MemSQL also cost effectively supports both application and ad-hoc queries concurrently across all data. Start a free 30 day trial here: http://www.memsql.com/


• aiScaler, aiProtect, aiMobile Application Delivery Controller with integrated Dynamic Site Acceleration, Denial of Service Protection and Mobile Content Management. Also available on Amazon Web Services. Free instant trial, 2 hours of FREE deployment support, no sign-up required. http://aiscaler.com


• 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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How We Scale VividCortex's Backend Systems

This is guest post by Baron Schwartz, Founder & CEO of VividCortex, the first unified suite of performance management tools specifically designed for today's large-scale, polyglot persistence tier.

VividCortex is a cloud-hosted SaaS platform for database performance management. Our customers install agents that measure the work their servers perform (queries, processes, etc) and generate metrics and events from that at high frequency. The agents send the resulting data to our APIs, where we host our analysis backend. The backend system is a collection of databases, internal services (quasi-microservices), and web-facing APIs. These APIs also power our AngularJS frontend application.

We deal with a lot of data. We ingest metrics and events at high speed. We also perform analytics that touch large amounts of data interactively. We are not unique and I don't want to imply we are somehow impressive in the scheme of things. We don't yet operate at "web scale." Nevertheless, our workload has some relatively unusual characteristics, and we've been able to scale as far as we have, while remaining pretty efficient in terms of cost and infrastructure. And my career in consulting has taught me that building systems like this is usually a challenge for a company (as it has been for us). Our story might be useful to others. For that reason I will go into unnecessary detail on specific parts of our workload and the challenges it brings.

What We Do

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Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For March 27th, 2015

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

@scienceporn: That Hubble Telescope picture explained in depth. I have never had anything blow my mind so hard.

• hundreds of billions: files in Dropbox; $2 billion: amount Facebook saved building their own servers, racks, cooling, storage, flat fabric, etc.
• Quotable Quotes:
  • Buckminster Fuller: I was born in the era of the specialist. I set about to be purposely comprehensive. I made up my mind that you don't find out something just to entertain yourself. You find out things in order to be able to turn everything not just into a philosophical statement, but actual tools to reorganize the environment of man by which greater numbers of men can prosper. That's been my main undertaking.
  • @mjpt777: PCI-e based SSDs are getting so fast. Writing at 1GB/s for well less than $1000 is so cool.
  • @DrQz: All meaning has a pattern, but not all patterns have a meaning.
  • Stu: “Exactly once” has *always* meant “at least once but dupe-detected”. Mainly because we couldn’t convince customers to send idempotent and communitative state changes.
  • @solarce: When some companies have trouble scaling their database they use Support or Consultants. Apple buys a database vendor. 
  • @nehanarkhede: Looks like Netflix will soon surpass LinkedIn's Kafka deployment of 800B events a day. Impressive.
  • @ESPNFantasy: More than 11.57 million brackets entered. Just 14 got the entire Sweet 16 correct.
  • @BenedictEvans: A cool new messaging app getting to 1m users is the new normal. Keeping them, and getting to 100m, is the question.
  • @jbogard: tough building software systems these days when your only two choices are big monoliths and microservices
  • @nvidia: "It isn't about one GPU anymore, it's about 32 GPUs" Andrew Ng quotes Jen-Hsun Huang. GPU scaling is important #GTC15


• FoundationDB, a High Scalability advertiser and article contributer, has been acquired. Apple scooped them up. Though saving between 5% to 10% less hardware than Cassandra seems unlikely. And immediately taking their software off GitHub is a concerning trend. It adds uncertainty to the entire product selection dance. Something to think about.


• In the future when an AI tries to recreate a virtual you from your vast data footprint, the loss of FriendFeed will create a big hole in your virtual personality. I think FF catches a side of people that isn't made manifest in other mediums. Perhaps 50 years from now people will look back on our poor data hygiene with horror and disbelief. How barbaric they were in the past, people will say. 


• When the nanobots turn the world to goo this 3D printer can recreate it again. New 3-D printer that grows objects from goo. Instead of a world marked by an endless battle of good vs evil we'll have a ceaseless cycle of destruction and rebirth through goo. That's unexpected. A modern mythology in the making.

Don't miss all that the Internet has to say on Scalability, click below and become eventually consistent with all scalability knowledge (which means this post has many more items to read so please keep on reading)...

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The Convergence that Changes Everything: Data Gravity + Containers + Microservices

What will change everything this time?

• Data Gravity (move compute to data) + 
• Containers (lightweight computation) +
• Microservices (composable compute modules)

That’s according to John Willis and Damon Edwards on a highly recommended recent DevOps Cafe Episode.

The high concept goes something like:

• Containers are the killer app for microservices.

• Data Gravity is the killer app for containers.

The logic goes something like:

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Three Simple Rules for Building Data Products that People Will Actually Use

Tim Trefren is one of the founders at Mixpanel, the most advanced analytics platform for web & mobile applications. He has many years of experience building compelling, accessible interfaces to data. To learn more, check out the Mixpanel engineering blog.

Building data products is not easy.

Many people are uncomfortable with numbers, and even more don't really understand statistics. It's very, very easy to overwhelm people with numbers, charts, and tables - and yet numbers are more important than ever. The trend toward running companies in a data-driven way is only growing...which means more programmers will be spending time building data products. These might be internal reporting tools (like the dashboards that your CEO will use to run the company) or, like Mixpanel, you might be building external-facing data analysis products for your customers.

Either way, the question is: how do you build usable interfaces to data that still give deep insights?

We've spent the last 6 years at Mixpanel working on this problem. In that time, we've come up with a few simple rules that apply to almost everyone:

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Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For March 20th, 2015

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

What a view! The solar eclipse at sunrise from the International Space Station.

• 60 billion: rows in DynamoDB; 18.5 billion: BuzzFeed impressions
• Quotable Quotes:
  • @postwait: Hell is other people’s APIs.
  • @josephruscio: .@Netflix is now 34% of US Internet traffic at night. 2B+ hours of streaming a month. #SREcon15
  • Geo Curnoff: Everything he said makes an insane amount of sense, but it might sound like a heresy to most people, who are more interested in building software cathedrals rather than solving real problems.
  • Mike Acton: Reality is not a hack you're forced to deal with to solve your abstract, theoretical problem. Reality is the actual problem.
  • @allspaw: "The right tool for the job!" said someone whose assumptions, past experience, motivations, and definition of "job" aren't explicit.
  • Sam Cutler: Mechanical ignorance is, in fact, not a strength.
  • @Grady_Booch: Beautiful quote from @timoreilly “rms is sort of like an Old Testament prophet, with lots of ‘Thou shalt not.'" 
  • @simonbrown: "With event-sourcing, messaging is back in the hipster quadrant" @ufried at #OReillySACon
  • @ID_AA_Carmack: I just dumped the C++ server I wrote last year for a new one in Racket. May not scale, but it is winning for development even as a newbie.
  • @mfdii: Containers aren't going to reduce the need to manage the underlying services that containers depend on. Exhibit A: 
  • @bdnoble: "DevOps: The decisions you make now affect the quality of sleep you get later." @caitie at #SREcon15
  • @giltene: By that logic C++ couldn't possibly multiply two integers faster than an add loop on CPUs with no mul instruction, right?
  • @mjpt777: Aeron beats all the native C++ messaging implementations and it is written in Java. 
  • @HypertextRanch: Here's what happens to your Elasticsearch performance when you upgrade the firmware on your SSDs.
  • @neil_conway: Old question: "How is this better than Hadoop?". New question: How is this better than GNU Parallel?"
  • @evgenymorozov: "Wall Street Firm Develops New High-Speed Algorithm Capable Of Performing Over 10,000 Ethical Violations Per Second"


• And soon the world's largest army will have no soldiers. @shirazdatta: In 2015 Uber, the world's largest taxi company owns no vehicles, Facebook the world's most popular media owner creates no content, Alibaba, the most valuable retailer has no inventory and Airbnb the world's largest accommodation provider owns no real estate.


• Not doing something is still the #1 performance improver. Coordination Avoidance in Database Systems: after looking at the problem from a fresh perspective, and without breaking any of the invariants required by TPC-C, the authors were able to create a linearly scalable system with 200 servers processing 12.7M tps – about 25x the next-best system.


• Tesla and the End of the Physical World. Tesla downloading new software to drastically improve battery usage is cool, but devices have been doing this forever. Routers, switches, set tops, phones, virtually every higher end connected device knows how to update itself. Cars aren't any different. Cars are just another connected device. Also, interesting that Tesla is Feature Flagging their new automatic steering capability.


• The Apple Watch is technology fused with fashion and ecosystem in a way we've never seen before. Which is a fascinating way of routing around slower moving tech cycles. Cycles equal money. Do you need a new phone or tablet every year? Does the technology demand it? Not so much. But fashion will. Fashion is a force that drives cycles to move for no reason at all. And that's what you need to make money. Crazy like a fox.

Don't miss all that the Internet has to say on Scalability, click below and become eventually consistent with all scalability knowledge (which means this post has many more items to read so please keep on reading)...

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Sponsored Post: Signalfuse, InMemory.Net, Sentient, Couchbase, VividCortex, Internap, Transversal, MemSQL, Scalyr, FoundationDB, AiScaler, Aerospike, AppDynamics, ManageEngine, Site24x7

Who's Hiring?

• Sentient Technologies is hiring several Senior Distributed Systems Engineers and a Senior Distributed Systems QA Engineer. Sentient Technologies, is a privately held company seeking to solve the world’s most complex problems through massively scaled artificial intelligence running on one of the largest distributed compute resources in the world. Help us expand our existing million+ distributed cores to many, many more. Please apply here.


• Linux Web Server Systems Engineer – Transversal. We are seeking an experienced and motivated Linux System Engineer to join our Engineering team. This new role is to design, test, install, and provide ongoing daily support of our information technology systems infrastructure. As an experienced Engineer you will have comprehensive capabilities for understanding hardware/software configurations that comprise system, security, and library management, backup/recovery, operating computer systems in different operating environments, sizing, performance tuning, hardware/software troubleshooting and resource allocation. Apply here.


• UI Engineer– AppDynamics, founded in 2008 and lead by proven innovators, is looking for a passionate UI Engineer to design, architect, and develop our their user interface using the latest web and mobile technologies. Make the impossible possible and the hard easy. Apply here.


• Software Engineer - Infrastructure & Big Data – AppDynamics, leader in next generation solutions for managing modern, distributed, and extremely complex applications residing in both the cloud and the data center, is looking for a Software Engineers (All-Levels) to design and develop scalable software written in Java and MySQL for backend component of software that manages application architectures. Apply here.

Fun and Informative Events

• Rise of the Multi-Model Database. FoundationDB Webinar: March 10th at 1pm EST. Do you want a SQL, JSON, Graph, Time Series, or Key Value database? Or maybe it’s all of them? Not all NoSQL Databases are not created equal. The latest development in this space is the Multi Model Database. Please join FoundationDB for an interactive webinar as we discuss the Rise of the Multi Model Database and what to consider when choosing the right tool for the job.

Cool Products and Services

• SignalFx: just launched an advanced monitoring platform for modern applications that's already processing 10s of billions of data points per day. SignalFx lets you create custom analytics pipelines on metrics data collected from thousands or more sources to create meaningful aggregations--such as percentiles, moving averages and growth rates--within seconds of receiving data. Start a free 30-day trial!


• InMemory.Net provides a Dot Net native in memory database for analysing large amounts of data. It runs natively on .Net, and provides a native .Net, COM & ODBC apis for integration. It also has an easy to use language for importing data, and supports standard SQL for querying data. http://InMemory.Net


• Top Enterprise Use Cases for NoSQL. Discover how the largest enterprises in the world are leveraging NoSQL in mission-critical applications with real-world success stories. Get the Guide.
  http://info.couchbase.com/HS_SO_Top_10_Enterprise_NoSQL_Use_Cases.html


• VividCortex goes beyond monitoring and measures the system's work on your MySQL and PostgreSQL servers, providing unparalleled insight and query-level analysis. This unique approach ultimately enables your team to work more effectively, ship more often, and delight more customers.


• SQL for Big Data: Price-performance Advantages of Bare Metal. When building your big data infrastructure, price-performance is a critical factor to evaluate. Data-intensive workloads with the capacity to rapidly scale to hundreds of servers can escalate costs beyond your expectations. The inevitable growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) and fast big data will only lead to larger datasets, and a high-performance infrastructure and database platform will be essential to extracting business value while keeping costs under control. Read more.


• MemSQL provides a distributed in-memory database for high value data. It's designed to handle extreme data ingest and store the data for real-time, streaming and historical analysis using SQL. MemSQL also cost effectively supports both application and ad-hoc queries concurrently across all data. Start a free 30 day trial here: http://www.memsql.com/


• In-Memory Computing at Aerospike Scale. How the Aerospike team optimized memory management by switching from PTMalloc2 to JEMalloc.


• Diagnose server issues from a single tab. The Scalyr log management tool replaces all your monitoring and analysis services with one, so you can pinpoint and resolve issues without juggling multiple tools and tabs. It's a universal tool for visibility into your production systems. Log aggregation, server metrics, monitoring, alerting, dashboards, and more. Not just “hosted grep” or “hosted graphs,” but enterprise-grade functionality with sane pricing and insane performance. Trusted by in-the-know companies like Codecademy – try it free! (See how Scalyr is different if you're looking for a Splunk alternative.)


• aiScaler, aiProtect, aiMobile Application Delivery Controller with integrated Dynamic Site Acceleration, Denial of Service Protection and Mobile Content Management. Also available on Amazon Web Services. Free instant trial, 2 hours of FREE deployment support, no sign-up required. http://aiscaler.com


• 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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In-Memory Computing at Aerospike Scale: When to Choose and How to Effectively Use JEMalloc

This is a guest post by Psi Mankoski (email), Principal Engineer, Aerospike.

When a customer’s business really starts gaining traction and their web traffic ramps up in production, they know to expect increased server resource load. But what do you do when memory usage still keeps on growing beyond all expectations? Have you found a memory leak in the server? Or else is memory perhaps being lost due to fragmentation? While you may be able to throw hardware at the problem for a while, DRAM is expensive, and real machines do have finite address space. At Aerospike, we have encountered these scenarios along with our customers as they continue to press through the frontiers of high scalability.

In the summer of 2013 we faced exactly this problem: big-memory (192 GB RAM) server nodes were running out of memory and crashing again within days of being restarted. We wrote an innovative memory accounting instrumentation package, ASMalloc [13], which revealed there was no discernable memory leak. We were being bitten by fragmentation.

This article focuses specifically on the techniques we developed for combating memory fragmentation, first by understanding the problem, then by choosing the best dynamic memory allocator for the problem, and finally by strategically integrating the allocator into our database server codebase to take best advantage of the disparate life-cycles of transient and persistent data objects in a heavily multi-threaded environment. For the benefit of the community, we are sharing our findings in this article, and the relevant source code is available in the Aerospike server open source GitHub repo. [12]

Executive Summary

• Memory fragmentation can severely limit scalability and stability by wasting precious RAM and causing server node failures.
  

• Aerospike evaluated memory allocators for its in-memory database use-case and chose the open source JEMalloc dynamic memory allocator.
  

• Effective allocator integration must consider memory object life-cycle and purpose.
  

• Aerospike optimized memory utilization by using JEMalloc extensions to create and manage per-thread (private) and per-namespace (shared) memory arenas.
  

• Using these techniques, Aerospike saw substantial reduction in fragmentation, and the production systems have been running non-stop for over 1.5 years.

Introduction

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