Hey, it's HighScalability time:

Best selfie ever? All vacation photos taken by Apollo astronauts are now online. Fakes, obvi.

• millions: # of Facebook users have no idea they’re using the internet; 8%: total of wealth in tax havens; $7.3B: AWS revenues; 11X: YouTube bigger than Facebook; 10: days 6s would last on diesel; 65: years ago the transistor was patented; 80X: reduction in # of new drugs approved per billion US dollars spent since 1950; 37 trillion: cells in the human body; 83%: accuracy of predicting activities from pictures.


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @Nick_Craver: Stack Overflow HTTP, last 30 days: Bytes 128,095,601,184,645 Hits 5,795,253,218 Pages 1,921,499,030 SQL 19,229,946,858 Redis 11,752,754,019
  • @merv: #reinvent Amazon process for creating new offerings: once decision is made "write the press release and the FAQ you’ll use - then build it."
  • @PaulMiller: @monkchips to @ajassy, “One of your biggest competitors is stupidity.” Quite. Or inertia. #reInvent
  • @DanHarper7: If SpaceX can publish their pricing for going to space, your little SaaS does NOT need "Contact us for pricing" 
  • @etherealmind: If you haven't implemented 10GbE yet, start thinking about 25GbE instead. Cost per port is roughly 1.4x for 2.5x performance.
  • @g2techgroup: Some of the most expensive real estate in the world was being used for data storage...We should not be in the data center business #reinvent
  • The microservices cargo cult: the biggest advantage a microservice architecture brings to the table that is hard to get with other approaches is scalability. Every other benefit can be had by a bit of discipline and a good development process.
  • findjashua: the new 'best practice' is to have a universal app - that renders on the server on first load, and runs as a js app subsequently. This way crawlers and browsers w js disabled still get raw markup.
  • Instagram: Do the simple thing first.
  • erikpukinskis: Generic containers are an awkward mid-way point between special-purpose containers (a Wordpress instance or a rails app on heroku) and an actual machine. You get the hassle of maintaining your own instances, without the flexibility or well-defined performance characteristics of an actual box.
  • @AWSreInvent: Showing off the Amazon Snowball - a 47lb, 50TB device for transporting data to the AWS cloud #reInvent 
  • @merv: #reinvent “There is no compression algorithm for experience” - Andy Jassy. Well said.
  • Alexander von Zitzewitz: I know that about 90% of software systems are suffering from severe architectural erosion, i.e. there is not a lot of the original architectural structure left in them, and coupling and dependencies are totally out of control.
  • Haunted By Data: But information about people retains its power as long as those people are alive, and sometimes as long as their children are alive. No one knows what will become of sites like Twitter in five years or ten. But the data those sites own will retain the power to hurt for decades.


• Data is valuable, especially if you can turn it into your own private wire. Scandal Erupts in Unregulated World of Fantasy Sports. How many other data archipelagos are being used as private opaque oracles?


• Cool idea, using drones as an exponential technology to spread seeds, countering deforestation with industrial scale reforestation. BioCarbon Engineering. It's precision forestry. A mapping drone system is used to generate high quality 3D maps of an area. Then drones follow a predetermined planting pattern derived from the mapping phase to air fire biodegradable seed pods onto the ground from a height of 1-2 meters. A problem not unlike dropping a mars rover. Clever pod design shields the seeds from impact while giving them the best chance at germination. This approach recapitulates the batch to real-time transformation that we are seeing everywhere. The current version uses a batch approach with distinct pipelined phases. One can imagine the next version using a swarm of communicating drones to coordinate both the mapping and planting in real-time; perhaps even target selection can be automated to form a continuous reactive system.


• Birmingham Hippodrome shows how they use Heroku and Facebook's HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine) to scale their WordPress system and keep it running on a modest budget. Maximum of 4 Standard-1X dynos; Peak requests: ~800/minute; Average memory use per dyno: 130MB; no downtime; Median response time : 5ms; Peak dyno load (so far): ~3.0.

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