Hey, it's HighScalability time:

Test your sense of scale. Is this image of something microscopic or macroscopic? Find out.

• 26,496: number of cores in Amazon's supercomputer; 128 billion: WDC's huge web graph publicly available; 400 million: Snapchat more photos than Facebook per day; 300,000: Microsoft's servers for Xbox; 1 million: MessageMe user growth in one week
• Quotable Quotes:
  • Jony Ive: I feel that ideas are very fragile, so you have to be tender when they are in development. I realized that if he pissed on this, it would be so sad because I know it was so important.
  • @BenedictEvans: 100m users is the new 1m users. $4bn is the new $400m. 30 staff is the new 300 staff.
  • @postwait: Knowing the latency of every I/O on every spindle in every machine in every rack... over all of time. Done & eye-opening. Thanks @circonus.
  • @mrb_bk: Things that hurt: unbounded memory growth. Things that help: concurrency control.
  • @sogrady: the latest version of chaos monkey described by @adrianco at re:invent is positively sadistic. most weaponizable software ever?
  • Joe Landman: More efficient, faster units, pay for themselves very quickly when compared to inspecific designs that make fine mail servers, but terrible storage controllers, or network hubs, or … The argument makes sense at scale and at small scale.
  • Sync: In other words, a dumb rule (majority rule) running on a smart architecture (a small world) achieved performances that broke the world.


• Jamestown was a startup established in ~1617. Lethal conditions soon required hiring more employees. The hiring bonus used to induce people to sign on was greater independence and self rule. The first American pivot.


• Everyone hates cubicles, yet they are still the best packing algorithm for humans in rectangular spaces. And if we lose productivity to noise and other cube farm diseases, does that really matter? Research: Cubicles Are the Absolute Worst


• My how the world has changed. In 1996 The Oracle of Bacon, a web site for automatically computing the shortest possible chain of costars between Kevin Bacon and any other film actor, was selected by Time magazine as a top 10 web site. At its height the site was bludgeoned with as many as 20,000 hits a day.


• You can't compete with a entrenched technology like the cloud by doing more or better cloud. You need to take a leap. Here's an example of what a leap looks like. +PeerServer:  a peer-to-peer client server using WebRTC, where your browser acts as a server for other browsers across WebRTC peer-to-peer data channels. 

Don't miss all that the Internet has to say on Scalability, click below and become eventually consistent with all scalability knowledge...