Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For May 31, 2013

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

(resource consumption scales sub-linearly with population; economic output scales super-linearly)

• 4PB: Ancestry.com's House of Us
• Quotable Quotes:
  • @kellabyte: XBOX Live scaling up from 15,000 servers to 300,000 servers. That's some scale right there.
  • @giuseppegurgone: [...] that could work for small projects. "why do we worry about scalability on day 1?" because tomorrow it could be too late :)
  • Max Boot: American troops found their tactics and technology, still designed to defeat an opponent like the now defunct Red Army, woefully inadequate to deal with these new threats. In this sort of war, there were no flanks to turn, few bastions to storm, no capitals to seize. 
• Steve Jobs on the power of having 120 million credit cards on file: You need us more than we need you.
• Netflix: Dystopia as a Service. Adrian Cockcroft describes an out of Eden world where hardware and software by nature sin against man and how you can fortify yourself against them with righteous coding.

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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Google Finds NUMA Up to 20% Slower for Gmail and Websearch

When you have a large population of servers you have both the opportunity and the incentive to perform interesting studies. Authors from Google and the University of California in Optimizing Google’s Warehouse Scale Computers: The NUMA Experience conducted such a study, taking a look at how jobs run on clusters of machines using a NUMA architecture. Since NUMA is common on server class machines it's a topic of general interest for those looking to maximize machine utilization across clusters.

Some of the results are surprising:

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Amazon: Creating a Customer Utopia One Culture Hack at a Time

If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will. -- Steve Jobs

America as the New World has a long history of inspiring Utopian communities. Early experiments were famously religious. But there have been many others as new waves of thought have inspired people to organize and try something different.

In the 1840s Transcendentalists, believing the true path lay in the perfection of the individual, created intentional communities like Brook Farm. We've also seen socialist, anarchist, hippy, and virtually every other kind of Utopia in-between. Psychologist B.F. Skinner wrote an infamous book, Walden Two, with a more "scientific" take on creating a Utopian community and Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged had her free market version.

I believe in startup organizations we see the modern version of Utopian energy in action. We now call it by names like "culture hacking", but the goal is the same: to create a new form of human community to achieve a profound goal. You may think startups are only about money, and they are about the money, but they are also about building something great and creating lasting value. There's a powerful vision and purpose animating the best of startups.

And the startup industry is completely self-concious and about its structure and goals. Nothing is done without a reason. Just like how Utopian communities are founded. Many of the profiles on High Scalability have large sections on how a startup culture is created and maintained. It's a hot topic of discussion in the industry. Almost taking on a religious tinge, as if a new social structure was being formed.

So I was interested to see in Amazon: We cut prices to scare ourselves into innovation how Amazon's fecundity is no accident. Amazon uses purposeful culture hacks to create a stunning stream of new features and prevent the culture rot that normally infects larger successful companies.

What culture hacks does Amazon use that you might be able to learn from?

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Who's Hiring?

• Blurocket is looking for smart and fun people to build its next generation ecommerce platform.  If creating scalable services is in your DNA, let us know! (Salary $250k+). Apply over at StackOverflow.
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• 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.
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• 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

Fun and Informative Events

• Surge - The Scalability & Performance Conference, presented by OmniTI is happening on Sept. 12th-13th. Special, High Scalability Reader Rate: $50 off registration--now through September 10! Book hotel and get $50 off, from OmniTI. FREE Puppet training w/registration, September 11.
• 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

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• 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. The API is a powerful tool and something everyone should know about, regardless of your level of technical ability.
• 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.
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• 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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Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For May 24, 2013

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

(Scaling the Mighty Redwood photograph by Michael Nichols for NatGEO)

• ~20K : Netflix AWS instances; 100 million hours per minute: Youtube video upload;
• Quotable Quotes:
  • @sw17ch: Computer Science is thinking about thinking. Software Engineering is thinking about how to avoid thinking.
  • @neha: I am starting a distributed systems reading group at MIT. Suggestions on papers to read? Current list here.
  • John Sheehan: Services are the new process
  • @cheeseplus: Sharding isn’t a scalability strategy, it’s a failure mode in progress.
  • @basharatw: @adrianco Features in days, not months; hw in mins not weeks; incident response in secs not hours … there's a trade off for utopia #gluecon
  • @mgroeninger: @johnsheehan now telling a story about struggling against tools... quit to build a better hammer #gluecon < this is the heart of devops
  • @aneel: "you really have to do a reorg to do devops and you really have to do a reorg to do cloud-native" - @adrianco #gluecon
  • @voodoogeek: scalability. why is it so hard to understand? and please please do NOT tell me it was not foreseeable and the usual BS.
  • @joestump: Celery's queue routing key stuff is pretty swanky. If you don't need low latency messaging, highly recommend celery + SQS. 0 maintenance.


• There are more kinds of programming in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your data structure books...Cell-Based Computing Goes Analog: designing circuits in Escherichia coli that could perform functions based on a range of inputs, much like the temperature gauge on a thermostat. Specifically, the circuits were sensitive to levels of sugar arabinose or acyl homoserine lactone.


• Startups are the new intentional communities attempting to do right by hacking human nature and founding a utopia. To see this in action take a look at Why I Spent 200 Hours Writing Culture Code Instead of Python Code. A Walden 3.0?


• Horst Simon on Why we need Exascale and why we won’t get there by 2020: You could say that the end of the HPC world as we know it began in 2004, when we hit the inflection point of power use and clock speed. That’s when we realized that we could not keep increasing clock speed due to power demands (and heat), but needed to move to much greater parallelism. In “new” HPC, power is the primary design constraint for future HPC system design; data movement dominates costs, so we need to optimize to minimize data movement; to increase concurrency we look to exponential growth of parallelism within chips. This “new” reality fundamentally breaks our current programming paradigm and computing ecosystem.

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: Calvin: Fast Distributed Transactions for Partitioned Database Systems

Distributed transactions are costly because they use agreement protocols. Calvin says, surprisingly, that using a deterministic database allows you to avoid the use of agreement protocols. The approach is to use a deterministic transaction layer that does all the hard work before acquiring locks and the beginning of transaction execution.

Overview:

Many distributed storage systems achieve high data access throughput via partitioning and replication, each system with its own advantages and tradeoffs. In order to achieve high scalability, however, today’s systems generally reduce transactional support, disallowing single transactions from spanning multiple partitions. Calvin is a practical transaction scheduling and data replication layer that uses a deterministic ordering guarantee to significantly reduce the normally prohibitive contention costs associated with distributed transactions. Unlike previous deterministic database system prototypes, Calvin supports disk-based storage, scales near-linearly on a cluster of commodity machines, and has no single point of failure. By replicating transaction inputs rather than effects, Calvin is also able to support multiple consistency levels—including Paxos based strong consistency across geographically distant replicas—at no cost to transactional throughput.

If you are interested Daniel Abadi gives a very accessible overview of Calvin in If all these new DBMS technologies are so scalable, why are Oracle and DB2 still on top of TPC-C? A roadmap to end their dominance.

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Strategy: Stop Using Linked-Lists

What data structure is more sacred than the link list? If we get rid of it what silly interview questions would we use instead? But not using linked-lists is exactly what Aater Suleman recommends in Should you ever use Linked-Lists?

In The Secret To 10 Million Concurrent Connections one of the important strategies is not scribbling data all over memory via pointers because following pointers increases cache misses which reduces performance. And there’s nothing more iconic of pointers than the link list.

Here are Aeter's reasons to be anti-linked-list:

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The Tumblr Architecture Yahoo Bought for a Cool Billion Dollars

It's being reported Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion. You may recall Instagram was profiled on HighScalability and they were also bought by Facebook for a ton of money. A coincidence? You be the judge.

Just what is Yahoo buying? The business acumen of the deal is not something I can judge, but if you are doing due diligence on the technology then Tumblr would probably get a big thumbs up. To see why, please keep on reading...

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Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For May 17, 2013

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

(Earth sized solar flare, some more flair)

• Google I/O to world: Just try to keep up with us. You can't. But go ahead and try. Nah na na na nah...


• 17 billion: Google Cloud Messaging messages per day with 60ms latency; 1B page views: 500px; 121 billion:  edge graph using Titan; 4 billion hours: hours watched on Netflix per quarter; 4.5 trillion: BigTable transactions per month


• Quotable Quotes:
  • to3m: As with any time you make plans for the future, sometimes you get it wrong. Ars longa vita brevis, and all that.
  • Callaghan’s law: a given row can’t be modified more than once per RTT
  • Josh Haberman: I had an epiphany one day when I realized that the kernel is nothing but a library with an expensive calling convention.
  • fread2281: Insane speed calls for insane measures.
  • Luke Gorrie: hardware really wants to run fast and you only need to avoid getting in the way --  not too hard if you write the whole stack to match your application, but very hard if you depend on abstractions and misunderstand what's going on.
  • Francis Stephens: This exposes an important, and to me non-obvious, property of concurrency. That it's not the locking that's really hard, it's how to be sure that every piece of related data is included in the lock (or STM).
  • @jamesurquhart: "Complexity is a characteristic of the system, not of the parts in it." -Dekker
  • Colin Scott: out of all the datacenter links types, the average downtime was 0.3 days. This translates to roughly three and a half 9’s of reliability, an order of magnitude greater than WAN links.
  • @adocortes: GPU vs CPU 40x faster for image processing in clusters


• Really fast growth really does happen says someone somewhere: Dots game from Betaworks hits 100 million game plays in first 2 weeks. 


• If you love something you should set it free or lose everything. Fred Wilson observes: This is a classic case of the innovator's dilemma. RIM felt that letting BBM out in the open would make it easier for Blackberry users to leave. So they kept it proprietary. For way too long. Now they no longer have a dominant smartphone franchise or a dominant mobile messenger franchise.


• When Big Data ecosystems start merging it's not the end of the world, but building a different world: Amex to tap big data (TripAdvisor) to expose fake reviews.

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: Warp: Multi-Key Transactions for Key-Value Stores

Looks like an interesting take on "a completely asynchronous, low-latency transaction management protocol, in line with the fully distributed NoSQL architecture."

Warp: Multi-Key Transactions for Key-Value Stores overview:

Implementing ACID transactions has been a longstanding challenge for NoSQL systems. Because these systems are based on a sharded architecture, transactions necessarily require coordination across multiple servers. Past work in this space has relied either on heavyweight protocols such as Paxos or clock synchronization for this coordination.

This paper presents a novel protocol for coordinating distributed transactions with ACID semantics on top of a sharded data store. Called linear transactions, this protocol achieves scalability by distributing the coordination task to only those servers that hold relevant data for each transaction. It achieves high performance by serializing only those transactions whose concurrent execution could potentially yield a violation of ACID semantics. Finally, it naturally integrates chain-replication and can thus tolerate faults of both clients and servers. We have fully implemented linear transactions in a commercially available data store. Experiments show that the throughput of this system achieves 1-9× more throughput than MongoDB, Cassandra and HyperDex on the Yahoo! Cloud Serving Benchmark, even though none of the latter systems provide transactional guarantees.