Hey, it's HighScalability time:

(Dr. Who Scaling Up the Shard click for cool animated gif)

• 50 sextillion: # of earth-like planets in universe; 100,000: stars
• Quotable Quotes:
  • @petdance: "I wish I had enough money to run Oracle instead of Postgres." "Why do you want to do that?" "I don't, I just wish I had enough money to."
  • @JBossMike: Java is old. Java is verbose. Java is boring. Java is dead… Java is FAST. 
  • @old_sound: We need a "shrink conf" for when scaling is not what we actually need.
  • Carsten Puls: At first, customers want to get going. Understanding what's going on under the hood isn't that important. As grows, want more control and go under the hood. Managing that balance through lifecycle is important.
  • @rbranson: What does almost every memcache library do during a multi-get when 1 out of 10 boxes times out? F*cking whole thing fails. < Reminded me of this
  • @heyavie: I wonder if King Kong's creators ever talked scalability?
  • arkitaip: It seems very risky to base your core business on a language that's only been around for two years. Sometimes web development seems to be more volatile than the fashion industry.
  • @_Mblueberries: I hate scaling and cleaning the fish.
  • @jcoglan: Reminder that 'scalability' is a property of system architecture and data layouts, not language runtimes (mostly)
  • @SuperLuckyHappy: Latest Headlines:  CIA: “Collect everything and hang on to it forever.” CIA Chief Technology Officer Big Data and Cloud Computing Pre
  • joelgrus: Finally, a way to combine the elegance of functional programming with the unwieldy, verbose syntax of Java!
  • The Archimedes Codex: The transition from the roll to the codex—the book format we know today—was a revolution in the history of data storage. The genius of the codex is that it contains knowledge not in two dimensions, like a roll, but in three. The roll has height and width; the codex has height, width, and depth. Because it has depth, it doesn’t need to be nearly as wide. A codex with 200 folios (400 pages), 6 inches wide, has the same potential data-storage area as a roll of the same height that is 200 feet long. To access data in a codex, you only have to travel through the depth dimension, which is just a couple of inches thick. 


• Custon Silcon + ZFS + Andy Bechtolsheim = DSSD, a chip startup to "improve the performance and reliability of flash memory for high performance computing, newer data analytics and networking." Pushing compute down to the edge, on to the disk, was long ago predicted by Jim Gray, who declared "locality is king" and "processors are going to migrate to where the transducers are." Sounds like DSSD is taking a shot at fulfilling Jim's vision. They are minimizing OS overhead, excellent. ZFS probably comes in because there's a long standing holy grail of implementing small fine grained objects in the file system, which is a performance nightmare, but extends the promise of doing away with the database layer. The gotcha with all these plays is commodity hardware. It's hard to maintain orders of magnitude performance gains over commodity players who are riding much cheaper cost curves and ever improving performance curves. Initial leads fade quickly and the capital costs keep rising. Sounds like there is a real software system's aspect here, so maybe that will decapitate those curves. In any case, it's great to see people developing hardware rather than staying mediocre with software.