Tuesday, July 12, 2011 at 8:55AM 
Joseph Smarr, former CTO of Plaxo (which explains why I recognized his picture), in I'm a technical lead on the Google+ team. Ask me anything, reveals the stack used for building Google+:
Tuesday, July 12, 2011 at 8:54AM 
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Monday, July 11, 2011 at 8:56AM This is a guest post by Ran Grushkowsky, Head of Technology at ATMCash.
Virtualization and cloud-based systems are very hype in the industry; however, most financial companies stray from those solutions. At ATMCash, we’ve approached virtualization not for the usual reason of scalability, but for the usually missed value of security.
In this article, I will introduce the concept of security added value in the utilization of virtualization and why people should consider deploying mini-clouds for those use-cases.
I am sure most of you have heard of the recent hacking in the financial sector. Financial companies are under constant hacking attempts and security is of the utmost importance. One of the bigger risks in system deployment is a breach in one of the stack components. Regular system patches and maintenance fix known exploits and issues, however, sometimes it may be too late and the component has already been breached. If the system has already been compromised in a natural environment where patches are applied to existing systems, sometimes the patch may come too late and a Trojan horse or some sort of malicious code has already been injected (as may have been seen in recent cases). Virtual machines provide a great hidden gem: immutability and reverting images.
Friday, July 8, 2011 at 7:50AM 
Submitted for your scaling pleasure:
Thursday, July 7, 2011 at 9:15AM 
For a long epoch there was a strategy of scaling up by making ever bigger super computers. I had the pleasure of programming on a few large massively multi-processor machines from SGI and DEC. Beautiful, highly specialized machines that were very expensive. These met the double-tap extinction event of Moore's law and a Google inspired era of commodity machine based clusters and extreme software parallelism. Has the tide turned? Does it now make more sense to use big machines instead of clusters?
In Big-Ass Servers™ and the myths of clusters in bioinformatics, Jerm makes the case that for bionformatics, it's more cost effective to buy a Big-Ass Server instead of using a cluster of machines and a lot of specialized parallel programming techniques. It's a classic scale-up argument that has been made more attractive by the recent development of relatively inexpensive large machines. SeaMicro has developed a 512 core machine. Dell has a new 96 core server. Supermicro has 48 core machines. These are new options in the scale-up game that have not been available before and could influence your architecture choice.
Jerm's reasoning for preferring big-ass servers is:
Tuesday, July 5, 2011 at 8:58AM
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Friday, July 1, 2011 at 10:54AM 
If you are an insect, don't work at TripAdvisor, specialization is out. One of the most commented on strategies from the TripAdvisor architecture article is their rather opinionated take on the role of engineers in the organization.
Typically engineers live in a box. They are specialized, they do database work and not much else, and they just do programming, not much else. TripAdvisor takes the road less traveled:
A radical take for an established organization. We've seen companies where backend engineers are also responsible for front-line site support, but I don't recall, other than for startups obviously, where engineers have such breadth and depth of responsibility. It's not right or wrong, but something outside-the-box to consider, especially if you are an Agile shop.
Friday, July 1, 2011 at 9:25AM Submitted for your scaling pleasure:
Wednesday, June 29, 2011 at 8:53AM 
Like a digital SWAT team that implodes the wrong door on a raid, the FBI seized multiple racks of computers from DigitalOne, these racks host websites from many clients that just happened to be in the same racks as whomever they are investigating. Downed sites include Instapaper, Curbed Network, and Pinboard. With the density of servers these days many 1000s of sites could easily have been effected.
Sites like Pinboard were victims by association, they did not inhale. This is an association sites have no control over. On a shared hosting service, you have no control over your fellow VM mates. In a cloud or a managed service, you have no control over which racks your servers are in. So like second hand smoke, you get the disease by random association. There's something inherently unfair about that.
A comment by illumin8 shows just how Darth insidious this process can be:
Tuesday, June 28, 2011 at 8:54AM
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