Kill the Telcos Save the Internet - The Unsocial Network

Someone is killing the Internet. Since you probably use the Internet everyday you might find this surprising. It almost sounds silly, and the reason is technical, but our crack team of networking experts has examined the patient and made the diagnosis. What did they find?

• Diagnostic team: the Packet Pushers gang (Greg Ferro, Jan Zorz, Ivan Pepelnjak) in the podcast How We Are Killing the Internet.
• Diagnosis: invasive tunnelation. (tubes anyone?)
• Prognosis: even Dr. House might not be able to help.
• Cure: go back to what the Internet was; kill the tunnels; route IPv4 and IPv6; have public addresses on everything; disrupt the telcos.

This is a classic story in a strange setting--the network--but the themes are universal: centralization vs. decentralization (that's where the telcos obviously come in), good vs. evil, order vs. disorder, tyranny vs. freedom, change vs. stasis, simplicity vs. complexity. And it's all being carried out on battlefield few get to see: the infrastructure of Internet.

Our emergency medics for this battle, in this free flowing and wide ranging podcast, pinpoint the problem: through IPv6 and telco domination we are losing the original beauty and simplicity of the Internet. In summary: 

Click to read more ...

Sponsored Post: New Relic, Atlassian, ScaleOut, aiCache, Rocketfuel, FreeAgent, Percona Live!, AppDynamics, Couchbase, CloudSigma, ManageEngine, Site24x7

Who's Hiring?

• Rocketfuel is hiring engineers to build ad-serving, bidding, modeling and data infrastructure built using a mix of proprietary and open-source technologies. Please apply here.
• FreeAgent - Senior Platform Engineer. FreeAgent is one of the UK's largest and most successful online accounting web apps, and we're growing at an explosive rate.  
• Couchbase is looking for talented people to help shape the future of data management and build a passionate community around exciting new database technologies. Check our website http://www.couchbase.com/company/jobs for the latest postings.

Fun and Informative Events

• Check out the CouchConf World Tour! This one-day conference is for anyone that wants to learn more about Couch NoSQL technology, learn where it's headed and build cool stuff. Check it out at http://www.couchbase.com/couchconf-world-tour
• Come one come all! Introducing Percona Live London! Join us for this two day intensive MySQL conference Oct 24th-25th. Save £40 on Percona's early bird and regular rate tickets with discount code: HiSc-PLUK

Cool Products and Services

• New Relic - real user monitoring optimize for humans, not bots. Live application stats, SQL/NoSQL performance, web transactions, proactive notifications. Take 2 minutes to sign up for a free trial.
• ScaleOut StateServer® Delivers Map/Reduce Analysis and Scalable Application Performance. Gain competitive advantage with rapid access to business intelligence. Download a free evaluation trial today.
• Atlassian announces: new hosted service by w/ à la carte issue tracker, wiki, dev tools, Google Apps integration and more. Starting at $10/month for 10 users! http://atlss.in/atlcloud
• aiCache creates a better user experience by increasing the speed scale and stability of your web-site.  
• 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. Instantly scalable European cloud servers.
• 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 ...

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For November 4, 2011

You're in good hands with HighScalability: 

• Netflix - Cassandra, AWS, 288 instances, 3.3 million writes per second.
• Quotable quotes:
  • @bretlowery : "A #DBA walks into a #NoSQL bar, but turns and leaves because he couldn't find a table."
  • @AdanVali : HP to Deploy Memristor Powered SSD Replacement Within 18 Months
  • @eden : Ori Lahav: "When planning scalability, think x100, design x5 and deploy x1.5 of current traffic"
  • @jkalucki : If you are IO bound, start with your checkbook!
• Everything I Ever Learned About JVM Performance Tuning @Twitter. Learn how to tune your Hotspot and other Javasutra secrets.
• By moving off the cloud Mixipanel may have lost their angel status. Why would they do such a thing? Read Why We Moved Off The Cloud for the details. The reason for the fall:  highly variable performance. Highly variable performance is incredibly hard to code or design around (think a server that normally does 300 queries per second with low I/O wait suddenly dropping to 50 queries second at 100% disk utilization for literally hours). It’s solvable, certainly, but with lots of time and money and it’s hard to justify the cost when there’s a better alternative available. On reddit. On Hacker News. Is that a bell I hear?

Want more of what the Internet has to say on scalability? Then click below before it's too late...

Click to read more ...

Paper: G2 : A Graph Processing System for Diagnosing Distributed Systems

One of the problems in building distributed systems is figuring out what the heck is going on. Usually endless streams of log files are consulted like ancients using entrails to divine the will of the Gods.

To rise above these ancient practices we must rise another level of abstraction and that's the approach described in a Microsoft research paper: G2: A Graph Processing System for Diagnosing Distributed Systems, which uses execution graphs that model runtime events and their correlations in distributed systems.

The problem with these schemes is viewing applications, written by programmers in low level code, as execution graphs. But we're heading in this direction in any case. To program a warehouse or an internet sized computer we'll have to write at higher levels of abstraction so code can be executed transparently at runtime on these giant distributed computers. There are many advantages to this approach, fault diagnosis and performance monitoring are just one of the wins.

Abstract from the paper:

Click to read more ...

15 Ways to Make Your Application Feel More Responsive under Google App Engine

Small Imrovements, makers of a hosted, lightweight feedback platform, have written an excellent article on Performance issues on GAE, and how we resolved them. They show how they trimmed most of their requests to between 300ms and 800ms, some still take 2 seconds when memcache is stale, and others clock in at 150ms. Not zippy overall, but acceptable, especially if you really like GAE's PaaS promise.

What's tricky with PaaS is if your performance is poor, there's often not a lot you can do about it. But the folks at Small Improvements have been clever and diligent, giving many specific details and timings. Though their advice is specifically for GAE, it will apply to a lot of different situations as well.

Here are the 15 ways they made small performance improvements: 

Click to read more ...

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For October 28, 2011

You deserve a HighScalability today:

• S3: 566 Billion Objects, 370K requests/sec; Titan: 38,400-processor, 20-petaflop
• 1,000,000 daily users and no cache. Wooga flash game with 50K DB updates/second, Ruby backend. They hit an IO wall with MySQL at 1000 DB updates/sec. They needed more so they went with Redis. Not quite honest to say no cache was used as everything is RAM, but maybe that's the point. Use a lot of automation. Inactive users are archived. Moved away from EBS. 
• Scaling Twilio. Twilio has scaled traffic by more 100x over the past year, and expanded their server infrastructure from a few servers to 100′s running in the cloud. Core technologies: PHP, Python, Twisted/gevent, Java, Asterisk/FreeSwitch/JSR289, MySQL, and Redis. Core principles: Simplicity, Automation, Shipping, Empiricism, and Humbleness.

Want more of what the Internet has to say? Then please read more below...

Click to read more ...

Strategy: Survive a Comet Strike in the East With Reserved Instances in the West

Ali Sadat of MuleSoft gave interesting presentation at Saturday's Talk Cloudy to Me! event about their experiences moving Mule iON, their ESB (enterprise service bus) product to the cloud.

First, a little about Talk Cloudy to Me. This event is the second one day cloud event put on by Sebastian Stadil, founder of Scalr, as part of the Cloud Computing Meetup group, also created by Sebastian. Sebastian has become a master at running these mini-conference style events. Really a quality job by him and his dedicated crew. These events are free, sponsored by various vendors; they are short, 11-5; the food is good, Thai; the venue is nice, eBay; they are on topic, with cloud and other speakers giving 30-45 minute talks. See some of the slidedecks by browsing the #talkcloudy hashtag on Twitter. More on the event when the video comes out. I type as fast as I can but I can't do much without the video.

Back to Ali Sadat. While he gave a lot of lessons--the integration will your billing system will take a lot longer than you think; talk to your Amazon account reps as they have good advice you might not have thought about; and move off EBS in favor of using local drives in a replicated configuration--the lesson that stuck with me was:

Click to read more ...

Sponsored Post: Atlassian, ScaleOut, Grid Dynamics, aiCache, Rocketfuel, FreeAgent, Percona Live!, New Relic, AppDynamics, Couchbase, CloudSigma, ManageEngine, Site24x7

Who's Hiring?

• Grid Dynamics is hiring engineers to use the latest advances in grid and cloud computing to build scalable services. Please send your cover letter and résumé to jobs@griddynamics.com
• Rocketfuel is hiring engineers to build ad-serving, bidding, modeling and data infrastructure built using a mix of proprietary and open-source technologies. Please apply here.
• FreeAgent - Senior Platform Engineer. FreeAgent is one of the UK's largest and most successful online accounting web apps, and we're growing at an explosive rate.  

Fun and Informative Events

• Check out the CouchConf World Tour! This one-day conference is for anyone that wants to learn more about Couch NoSQL technology, learn where it's headed and build cool stuff. Check it out at http://www.couchbase.com/couchconf-world-tour
• Come one come all! Introducing Percona Live London! Join us for this two day intensive MySQL conference Oct 24th-25th. Save £40 on Percona's early bird and regular rate tickets with discount code: HiSc-PLUK

Cool Products and Services

• ScaleOut StateServer® Delivers Map/Reduce Analysis and Scalable Application Performance. Gain competitive advantage with rapid access to business intelligence. Download a free evaluation trial today.
• Atlassian announces: new hosted service by w/ à la carte issue tracker, wiki, dev tools, Google Apps integration and more. Starting at $10/month for 10 users! http://atlss.in/atlcloud
• aiCache creates a better user experience by increasing the speed scale and stability of your web-site.  
• New Relic - real user monitoring optimize for humans, not bots. Live application stats, SQL/NoSQL performance, web transactions, proactive notifications. Take 2 minutes to sign up for a free trial.
• 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. Instantly scalable European cloud servers.
• 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 ...

StackExchange Architecture Updates - Running Smoothly, Amazon 4x More Expensive

We've had a few articles on the StackOverlflow Architecture and Stack Overflow Architecture Update - Now at 95 Million Page Views a Month. Time for another update. This time from a podcast. Every week or so Jeff, Joel and guests sit around and converse. The result is a podcast. In a recent podcast they talked about some of their recent architecture issues, problems, and updates. And since I wrote this article before my vacation, they've also published a new architecture update article: The Stack Exchange Architecture – 2011 Edition, Episode 1.

My overall impression is they are in a comfortable place, adding new sites, adding new features, making a house a home.

Notable for their scale-up architecture, you might expect with their growth that they would slam into a wall. Not so. They've been able to scale-up the power of individual servers by adding more CPU and RAM. SSD has been added in some cases. Even their flagship StackOverflow product runs on a single server. New machines have been bought, but very few.

So, the StackOverflow experiment shows the scale-up strategy for even largish sites is a good practice.  True, their product naturally separates by topic, much like the early Facebook, but Moore's law and quality engineering are your friends. They estimate Amazon would cost them 4 times much.

Here's what StackExchange has been up to:

Click to read more ...

Sponsored Post: Grid Dynamics, aiCache, Rocketfuel, FreeAgent, Percona Live!, Box, New Relic, Surge, AppDynamics, Couchbase, CloudSigma, ManageEngine, Site24x7

Who's Hiring?

• Grid Dynamics is hiring engineers to use the latest advances in grid and cloud computing to build scalable services. Please send your cover letter and résumé to jobs@griddynamics.com
• Rocketfuel is hiring engineers to build ad-serving, bidding, modeling and data infrastructure built using a mix of proprietary and open-source technologies. Please apply here.
• FreeAgent - Senior Platform Engineer. FreeAgent is one of the UK's largest and most successful online accounting web apps, and we're growing at an explosive rate.  
• Everything is sexier in the cloud. Box is hiring operations engineers and infrastructure automation engineers to help us revolutionize the way businesses collaborate. Please apply here.

Fun and Informative Events

• Curious about Couchbase Server 2.0? Register for a series of weekly 30-minute webinars. Couchbase has announced the CouchConf World Tour! Check it out at http://www.couchbase.com/couchconf-world-tour
• Come one come all! Introducing Percona Live London! Join us for this two day intensive MySQL conference Oct 24th-25th. Save £40 on Percona's early bird and regular rate tickets with discount code: HiSc-PLUK
• Surge 2011: The Scalability and Performance Conference. Surge is a chance to identify emerging trends and meet the architects behind established technologies. Early Bird Registration.

Cool Products and Services

• aiCache creates a better user experience by increasing the speed scale and stability of your web-site.  
• New Relic - real user monitoring optimize for humans, not bots. Live application stats, SQL/NoSQL performance, web transactions, proactive notifications. Take 2 minutes to sign up for a free trial.
• 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. Instantly scalable European cloud servers.
• 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 ...