Hey, it's HighScalability time:

Beautiful, isn't it? It's the cerebral cortex of a rat that is organized like a mini-Internet.

• $47 million: value of Cannabis per square km; $3.7 trillion: worldwide IT spending in 2014;  $41B: spend on spectrum; 48,000 square km: How Much Land Would it Take to Power the US via Solar; 2,000: Hadoop clusters in the world; 650 pounds: projected size of ET
• Quotable Quotes:
  • John Hugg: The number one rule of 21st century data management: If a problem can be solved with an instance of MySQL, it’s going to be.
  • @sarahnovotny: "there is no compression algorithm for experience" - great quote from Andy Jassy at #AWSSummit
  • Steve Martin: I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success.
  • Yossi Vardi: Revenues kill the dream.
  • @AWSSummits: AdRoll's retargeting and real-time betting operates at 6 billion impressions/day at 100ms latency on #AWS #AWSSummit 
  • @AWS_Partners: Nike is operating 70+ services as production loads in #aws today #AWSSummit 
  • @bernardgolden: S3 usage up 102% YOY, ec2 93%: #AWSSummit
  • @bernardgolden: AWS growing over 40% yoy. Next earnings announcement s/b v interesting. #awssummit 
  • @AlexBalk: Here is my Apple Watch review: Your life is largely meaningless. No gadget can obscure its emptiness. You are dying every day.
  • Jonas: Google: all apps become search. Facebook: all apps become feeds. 
  • @jon_moore: most scalable/fast/reliable systems follow these principles: elastic; responsive; resilient; message-driven. #phillyete
  • mrmondo: NVMe [Non-Volatile Memory Express] is one of the most important changes to storage over the past decade.
  • Peter Thiel: Often the smarter people are more prone to trendy, fashionable thinking because they can pick up on things, they can pick up on cues more easily, and so they’re even more trapped by it than people of average ability
  • @nickstenning: The women and men who wrote the nearly bug-free code that controlled a $4Bn space shuttle and the lives of astronauts worked 8am to 5pm.


• Have you been let down by miracle materials like carbon nanotubes, buckyballs, and graphene? MOFs  (metal–organic frameworks) are here and they are real. This Nature podcast and article tells you all about them (about 13 minutes in). MOFs are scaffolds made of metal containing nodes linked by carbon-based struts. They are pieces that you can plug together and build up into big networks which have spaces in-between. It's those spaces that make MOFs useful. You can trap things in those holes and do things to the molecules when they are trapped. You can store gasses like methane and hydrogen. You can separate mixture of things by varying the pore sizes. Carbon capture is one big use. They also can be used as chemical sensors, maybe in some future version of your watch. Also perhaps write-once-read-many times memory.


• Is Amazon recreating the Sun ecosystem in the cloud? We now have the Amazon Elastic File System so everything is remote mounted. WorkSpaces feels like diskless workstations. Storage is over on some NAS. The database is somewhere on the network. And so on. Let's hope NFS lock contention failures and network UI jitter don't also make a comeback. OK, I don't remember having anything like Amazon Machine Learning. 


• Etsy is giving Facebook's HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) for PHP a try. Why? Their API and web code was diverging under parallel development pressures. And they were developing many small API endpoints that used many small requests instead of larger requests that do more work per request. And instead of sharing state in an inherently shared nothing architecture they went with the strategy of just making things faster. This is where HHMV comes in.


• OK, that's impressive. Migrating from Heroku to AWS (using Docker). It took two engineers about one month. Performance increased 2x and average API response time dropped from around 220ms to under 100ms, and our background task execution times dropped in half as well. Half the number of servers were needed.


• I was excited to see AWS is opening up Lambda. It's close to some ideas I've been talking about for a while (Building Super Scalable Systems, What Google App Engine Price Changes Say About The Future Of Web Architecture). When it first came out I rehabed my atrophied node.js skills and gave it a shot. Played around a bit, got some code working, but the problem was Lambda only exposed a few integration points and none of those were anything I cared about. Now, they've made Lambda much more general and in the process much more useful. Worth another look. I also suspect their NFS product was necessary to generalize Lambda. Code could be instantly available on every machine via a mount point. Just like back in the day.


• How Early Adopters Are Using Unikernels - With and Without Containers: The creator of MirageOS, Anil Madhavapeddy’s group is working on a new tool stack called Jitsu (Just-in-Time Summoning of Unikernels), which can start a unikernel in ~20ms in response to a network request. < Also, Towards Heroku for Unikernels: Part 2 - Self Scaling Systems.

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