Sponsored Post: Surge, FiftyThree, ROBLOX, Percona, Palantir, ElasticHosts, Atlantic.Net, ScaleOut, New Relic, NetDNA, GigaSpaces, AiCache, Logic Monitor, AppDynamics, CloudSigma, ManageEngine, Site24x7

Who's Hiring?

• FiftyThree, the company behind the award-winning iPad app Paper, is looking for a {Backend || DevOps} Engineer to help us build our next great product: a service to "bring ideas together". http://www.fiftythree.com/jobs
• New Relic is looking for a Java Scalability Engineer in Portland, OR. Ready to scale a web service with more incoming bits/second than Twitter?  http://newrelic.com/about/jobs
• Palantir Technologies is hiring a Software Engineer to develop our technologies for exploring huge information sets and presenting complex information to end-users.
• Join the team at ROBLOX as a Senior Database Administrator and help us advance our rapidly growing gaming platform with over 30K web hits/sec, 75K+ database requests/sec, and over 1 petabyte of monthly CDN traffic. Sound cool? Apply here.

Fun and Informative Events

• Surge - A Scalability & Performance Conference, presented by OmniT is happening on Sept. 27th - 28th. Special, High Scalability Reader Rate: 25% off registration--now through September 21!
• Percona announces MySQL training for busy professional: Developer Training for MySQL. Percona is offering savings of over 35% for this course in the month of August.

Cool Products and Services

• ElasticHosts launches white-label cloud reseller program offering 30% revenue share on fully rebranded cloud hosting.
• Atlantic.Net with industry leading cloud servers backed by ultra-fast 40 Gigabits 4x Quad Rate Infiniband speeds, high throughput, low latency and newest RDMA technology. Free Trial Offer!
• ScaleOut Software. In-memorry Data Grids for the Enterprise. Download a Free Trial.
• Follow the Cloudify blog to learn more about our open source PaaS stack – latest integration recipes, builds, features, and other cool stuff.  Visit the GigaSpaces blog to learn how to take your application to the next level of scalability and performance.
• NetDNA, a Tier-1 GlobalContent Delivery Network, offers a Dual-CDN strategy which allows companies to utilize a redundant infrastructure while leveraging the advantages of multiple CDNs to reduce costs.
• aiCache creates a better user experience by increasing the speed scale and stability of your web-site. Test aiCache acceleration for free.  No sign-up required. http://aicache.com/deploy
• LogicMonitor - Hosted monitoring of your entire technology stack. Dashboards, trending graphs, alerting. Try it free and be up and running in just 15 minutes.
• AppDynamics is the very first free product designed for troubleshooting Java performance while getting full visibility in production environments. Visit http://www.appdynamics.com/free.
• CloudSigma. Utility style high performance cloud servers in the US and Europe delivered on all 10GigE networking. Run any OS, take advantage of SSD storage and tailored infrastructure options.
• ManageEngine Applications Manager : Monitor physical, virtual and Cloud Applications.
• www.site24x7.com : Monitor End User Experience from a global monitoring network.

For a longer description of each sponsor, please read more below...

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Changing Architectures: New Datacenter Networks Will Set Your Code and Data Free

One consequence of IT standardization and commodification has been Google’s datacenter is the computer view of the world. In that view all compute resources (memory, CPU, storage) are fungible. They are interchangeable and location independent, individual computers lose identity and become just a part of a service.

Thwarting that nirvana has been the abysmal performance of commodity datacenter networks which have caused the preference of architectures that favor the collocation of state and behaviour on the same box. MapReduce famously ships code over to storage nodes for just this reason.

Change the network and you change the fundamental assumption driving collocation based software architectures. You are then free to store data anywhere and move compute anywhere you wish. The datacenter becomes the computer...

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Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For August 31, 2012

It's HighScalability Time:

• LHC compute jobs: use 1.5 CPU millennia every 3 days; Obama helps load test Reddit: 4.3 million page views
• Quotable Quotes:
  • @secastro: Want to see nearly a terabyte of memory?
  • @DZone: Apache Projects are the Justice League of Scalability
• Apple And Google Might Be Negotiating Patents. Remember when empires and nation states would have a nice little summer war and then negotiate boundary lines and terms of trade?
• Google Faculty Summit 2012: The Online Revolution - Education at Scale. Someday we may have direct knowledge downloads and augmented wisdom packs, but until then these primitive attempts at learning process improvement are a good start. 

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

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Zoosk - The Engineering behind Real Time Communications

This is a guest post by Peter Offringa, VP of engineering at Zoosk. Zoosk is a 50 million member romantic social network.

Our members get the most rewarding experience from Zoosk when they can interact in real-time. After all, a future relationship is potentially at the other end of every connection a user makes. The excitement and richness of this situation can only be fully realized in real-time. The suite of Zoosk services facilitating these interactions are referred to by the general description of real-time communications (RTC). These communications are delivered using the XMPP protocol, which also powers other popular instant messaging products. Zoosk members experience real-time communications within three distinct interactions:

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Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For August 24, 2012

It's HighScalability Time:

• 500 TB/day: Facebook data 
• Quotable Quotes:
  • Tumblr mobocracy: This is what migrating a billion cache objects into a new cache pool looks like
  • #hoti it is possible to build all to all wdm networks where there is a wavelength per core.
• A Generation Lost in the Bazaar. The problem is Cathedrals are multi-generation projects, built by master craftsman, using an empirical process, not engineering principles. There is no complete specification, it's iterative and adaptive.  How Bazaar. 
• Here's a unique look at how the new Digg 4 structured their architecture and development processes to scale down to 14 engineers from a high of 40 engineers for the old Digg.

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

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Economies of Scale in the Datacenter: Gmail is 100x Cheaper to Run than Your Own Server

Urs Hoelzle, infrastructure guru and SVP at Google, made a really interesting statement about the economics of scale in the datacenter:

We’ve shown that when you run a large application in the datacenter, like Gmail, you can, compared to a small organization running their own email server, you can save nearly a factor of 100 in terms of compute and energy, when you run it at scale.

My first thought was shock at the magnitude of the difference. 100x is a chasm crosser. Then I thought about Gmail, it's horizontally scalable using technologies that are following Moore's Law (storage and compute), latency requirements are lax, a commodity network is sufficient, and it can be highly automated so management costs scale slower than users. After that it's a simple matter of software :-) Oh, and developing a market where it's "cheaper to run a large thing than a small thing."

Sponsored Post: ROBLOX, Percona, Palantir, ElasticHosts, Atlantic.Net, ScaleOut, ground(ctrl), New Relic, NetDNA, GigaSpaces, AiCache, Logic Monitor, AppDynamics, CloudSigma, ManageEngine, Site24x7

Who's Hiring?

• New Relic is looking for a Java Scalability Engineer in Portland, OR. Ready to scale a web service with more incoming bits/second than Twitter?  http://newrelic.com/about/jobs
• Palantir Technologies is hiring a Software Engineer to develop our technologies for exploring huge information sets and presenting complex information to end-users.
• Are you a seasoned systems admin? ground(ctrl) is looking for you! http://groundctrl.com/#!/jobs/senior-systems-administrator
• Join the team at ROBLOX as a Senior Database Administrator and help us advance our rapidly growing gaming platform with over 30K web hits/sec, 75K+ database requests/sec, and over 1 petabyte of monthly CDN traffic. Sound cool? Apply here.

Fun and Informative Events

• Percona announces MySQL training for busy professional: Developer Training for MySQL. Percona is offering savings of over 35% for this course in the month of August.

Cool Products and Services

• ElasticHosts launches white-label cloud reseller program offering 30% revenue share on fully rebranded cloud hosting.
• Atlantic.Net with industry leading cloud servers backed by ultra-fast 40 Gigabits 4x Quad Rate Infiniband speeds, high throughput, low latency and newest RDMA technology. Free Trial Offer!
• ScaleOut Software. In-memorry Data Grids for the Enterprise. Download a Free Trial.
• Follow the Cloudify blog to learn more about our open source PaaS stack – latest integration recipes, builds, features, and other cool stuff.  Visit the GigaSpaces blog to learn how to take your application to the next level of scalability and performance.
• NetDNA, a Tier-1 GlobalContent Delivery Network, offers a Dual-CDN strategy which allows companies to utilize a redundant infrastructure while leveraging the advantages of multiple CDNs to reduce costs.
• aiCache creates a better user experience by increasing the speed scale and stability of your web-site. Test aiCache acceleration for free.  No sign-up required. http://aicache.com/deploy
• LogicMonitor - Hosted monitoring of your entire technology stack. Dashboards, trending graphs, alerting. Try it free and be up and running in just 15 minutes.
• AppDynamics is the very first free product designed for troubleshooting Java performance while getting full visibility in production environments. Visit http://www.appdynamics.com/free.
• CloudSigma. Utility style high performance cloud servers in the US and Europe delivered on all 10GigE networking. Run any OS, take advantage of SSD storage and tailored infrastructure options.
• ManageEngine Applications Manager : Monitor physical, virtual and Cloud Applications.
• www.site24x7.com : Monitor End User Experience from a global monitoring network.

For a longer description of each sponsor, please read more below...

Click to read more ...

The Performance of Distributed Data-Structures Running on a "Cache-Coherent" In-Memory Data Grid

This is a guest post by Ron Pressler, the founder and CEO of Parallel Universe, a Y Combinator company building advanced middleware for real-time applications.

A little over a month ago, we open-sourced a new in-memory data grid called Galaxy. An in-memory data grid, or IMDG, is a clustered data storage and processing middleware that uses RAM as the authoritative and primary storage, and distributes data over a cluster for purposes of data and processing scalability and high-availability. A common feature of IMDGs is co-location of code and data, meaning that application code runs on all cluster nodes, each instance processing those data items residing in the local node's RAM.

While quite a few commercial and open-source IMDGs are available (like Terracotta, Gigaspaces, Oracle Coherence, GemFire, Websphere eXtreme Scale, Infinispan and Hazelcast), Galaxy has adopted a completely different architecture from all other IMDGs, to service some usage scenarios ill-fitted to the other solutions.

All other IMDGs, as well as most distributed NoSQL databases (like Riak and Cassandra) employ what is known as distributed hash-tables (DHTs) to partition and locate data items in the cluster. DHTs assign a data item to one or more cluster nodes based on a static hash value computed for each item's key (those systems provide access to items by keys). This means that an item's owning cluster-node(s) can be easily located, and require just one network roundtrip per access in the worst case (for a read or a write). However, that one network roundtrip is also required in the common case.

Galaxy, on the other hand, dynamically migrates items among cluster nodes making a different tradeoff: accessing an item might take more than one network roundtrip in the worst-case scenario, but the common case requires no hops at all ...

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Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For August 17, 2012

It's HighScalability Time:

• Quotable Quotes:
  • @rbranson: So turns out the EBS Provisioned IOPS volumes are not total shit. This injects the man with a few weeks of runway.
  • @markzohar: It is amazing to witness the efficiency & scalability of algorithms. Given the choice, build your tech company on algorithms not code.
• Your Bottleneck is Dead. Long Live Your Bottleneck. Mailinator's Paul Tyma brings up the interesting notion that once bottlenecks have moved to the CPU because programs can nolonger hide behind IO overhead - code efficiency becomes important again.

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

Click to read more ...

Paper: A Provably Correct Scalable Concurrent Skip List

In MemSQL Architecture we learned one of the core strategies MemSQL uses to achieve their need for speed is lock-free skip lists. Skip lists are used to efficiently handle range queries. Making the skip-lists lock-free helps eliminate contention and make writes fast. 

If this all sounds a little pie-in-the-sky then here's a very good paper on the subject that might help make it clearer: A Provably Correct Scalable Concurrent Skip List.

From the abstract:

We propose a new concurrent skip list algorithm distinguished by a combination of simplicity and scalability. The algorithm employs optimistic synchronization, searching without acquiring locks, followed by short lock-based validation before adding or removing nodes. It also logically removes an item before physically unlinking it. Unlike some other concurrent skip list algorithms, this algorithm preserves the skiplist properties at all times, which facilitates reasoning about its correctness. Experimental evidence shows that this algorithm performs as well as the best previously known algorithm under most circumstances.