Wednesday, January 13, 2016 at 8:56AM With 1.49 billion monthly active users, operating at Facebook scale is far from trivial. Facebook's new live video streaming services present a fascinating use case for designing streaming service in global distribution and massive scale.
Wednesday, August 22, 2012 at 9:15AM Many organizations are facing the challenge of migrating their IT to the cloud. But not many know how to actually approach this undertaking. In my previous post I took a hands-on example of SpringSource’s PetClinic reference application with a Tomcat web server front-end and a Cassandra NoSQL database backend and showed how to onboard it to the cloud in a manageable fashion. But many think this methodology is only good for modern applications that were built with some dynamic/cloud orientation in mind. For example, how different would the cloud on-boarding process be if I modify my PetClinic example to use a MySQL relational database instead of the modern Cassandra NoSQL clustered database? In this blog post I intend to show that cloud on-boarding of brownfield applications doesn’t have to be a huge monolithic migration project with high risk. Cloud on-boarding can take the pragmatic approach and can be performed in a gradual process that both mitigates the risk and enables you to enjoy the immediate benefits of automation and easier management of your application’s operational lifecycle even before moving to the cloud...
Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 9:34AM Constructing a scalable risk analysis solution is a fascinating architectural challenge. If you come from Financial Services you are sure to appreciate that. But even architects from other domains are bound to find the challenges fascinating, and the architectural patterns of my suggested solution highly useful in other domains.
Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 8:19AM A bit over a month ago Amazon experienced its infamous AWS outage in the US East Region. As a cloud evangelist, I was intrigued by the history of the outage as it occurred. There were great posts during and after the outage from those who went down. But more interestingly for me as architect were the detailed posts of those who managed to survive the outage relatively unharmed, such as SimpleGeo, Netflix,SmugMug, SmugMug’s CTO, Twilio, Bizo and others.
Reading through the experience of others, I tried to summarize the patterns, principles and best practices that emerged from these posts, as I believe we can learn a lot from them on how to design our business applications to truly leverage on the benefits that the cloud offers in high availability and scalability.
The main principles, patterns and best practices are:
