TripAdvisor Architecture - 40M Visitors, 200M Dynamic Page Views, 30TB Data

This is a guest post by Andy Gelfond, VP of Engineering for TripAdvisor. Andy has been with TripAdvisor for six and a half years, wrote a lot of code in the earlier days, and has been building and running a first class engineering and operations team that is responsible for the worlds largest travel site. There's an update for this article at An Epic TripAdvisor Update: Why Not Run On The Cloud? The Grand Experiment. 

For TripAdvisor, scalability is woven into our organization on many levels - data center, software architecture, development/deployment/operations, and, most importantly, within the culture and organization. It is not enough to have a scalable data center, or a scalable software architecture. The process of designing, coding, testing, and deploying code also needs to be scalable. All of this starts with hiring and a culture and an organization that values and supports a distributed, fast, and effective development and operation of a complex and highly scalable consumer web site.

Stats as of 6/2011

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Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For June 24, 2011

Submitted for your scaling pleasure: 

• Achievements:
  • Watson uses 10,000's of watts, the computer between the ears uses 20. With only 200 million pages and 2TB of data, Watson is BigInsights, not BigData.
  • That Google is pretty big: 1 billion unique monthly visitors
  • tweetimages: We peaked at 22m avatars yesterday. Bandwidth peaked at 9GB of @twitter avatars in a single hour.
  • Foursquare Surpasses 10 Million Users 
  • Reddit Hits 1.2B Monthly Pageviews, More Than Doubles Its Engineering Staff
  • Twitter: 185 million tweets are posted daily;  1.6 billion search queries daily; indexing latency is less than 10 seconds. 
• Quotable quotes:
  • skr: OH: "people wait their whole lives for a situation where they can use bloom filters"
  • joeweinman: @Werner at #structureconf : as of Nov 10, 2010, all Amazon.com traffic was served from AWS. <-- The child surpasses the parent.
  • bbatsov: A compiled language does not scalability make -- Yoda
  • swredman: If i read the marketing buzzwords 'scalability' or leverage your data' one more time, gonna lose my sh*t.
  • ipeirotis: Most tasks are too arbitrary to even decompose in atomic steps, while handling quality, cost, scalability and interactions.
  • ArmonDadgar: Some people. You had to use NoSQL for 2 TPS and a DB that can fit on my iPhone? This is some serious #BigData.
  • aphethean: For a guy who started Dev life programming applications on hierarchical databases #nosql looks remarkably familiar
  • "Software is an entropic system whose arrow of time flows in the direction of failure, aided and abetted by human bullsh*t"
  • bstg: Wonder if the best way to improve insights from #bigdata isn't better analytics, but a fundamental change in the way we capture it? #in
  For much more on what the Internet said this week, please read more below...

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It's the Fraking IOPS - 1 SSD is 44,000 IOPS, Hard Drive is 180

Planning your next buildout and thinking SSDs are still far in the future? Still too expensive, too low density. Hard disks are cheap, familiar, and store lots of stuff. In this short and entertaining video Wikia's Artur Bergman wants to change your mind about SSDs. SSDs are for today, get with the math already.

Here's Artur's logic:

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35+ Use Cases for Choosing Your Next NoSQL Database

We've asked What The Heck Are You Actually Using NoSQL For?. We've asked 101 Questions To Ask When Considering A NoSQL Database. We've even had a webinar What Should I Do? Choosing SQL, NoSQL or Both for Scalable Web Applications.

Now we get to the point of considering use cases and which systems might be appropriate for those use cases.

What are your options?

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Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For June 17, 2011

Submitted for your scaling pleasure: 

• Google's code base receives 20+ code changes per minute and 50% of the files change every month. Learn how they test all that. Graph analysis? Of course.
• Quatrains of quotably quotable quotes:
  • mehals: Reading the AmazonStorage Wiki and Game of Thrones. Lannister took a query as an insult to their scalability, laid siege to House Oracle.
  • jfpaccini: Werner Vogels at #awssummit: big data is one of the strongest driver to cloud computing.
  • johncmunoz: The average obscures the sexiness in your data. Show the distribution in your #bigdata. #SAS #Tableau #JMP #R, even #Excel will do.
  • Boss1881: The era of cloud-computing is approaching, but some are concerned - can wireless carriers keep up with network and data demands
  • bernardlunn: Just saw the Fail Whale (very briefly, well done scalability engineers), felt like old times
  • jfpaccini: Werner Vogels at #awssummit: big data is one of the strongest driver to cloud computing.
  • cloudcompete: Petabytes aren't cool... you know what's cool, Exabytes. #bigdata

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101 Questions to Ask When Considering a NoSQL Database

You need answers, I know, but all I have here are some questions to consider when thinking about which database to use. These are taken from my webinar What Should I Do? Choosing SQL, NoSQL or Both for Scalable Web Applications. It's a companion article to What The Heck Are You Actually Using NoSQL For?

Actually, I don't even know if there are a 101 questions, but there are a lot/way too many. You might want to use these questions as kind of a NoSQL I Ching, guiding your way through the immense possibility space of options that are in front of you. Nothing is fated, all is interpreted, but it might just trigger a new insight or two along the way.

Where are you starting from?

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Shakespeare on Why Other People Like Such Stupid Stuff

Jumping around the social mediasphere, it's not uncommon to feel the heat generated in praise of a favorite this or that over all the clearly inferior alternatives. Whilst human nature may never cool, I think Old Will had some insight worth considering the next time a flame threatens to flicker forth:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun (Sonnet 130)

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A TripAdvisor Short

Sometimes I get article proposals and then there's no follow up. Though these TripAdvisor data points are from 2010, I thought them worth sharing:

Our site serves in excess of 100M dynamically generated page view a day (all media and static content goes through CDN), and we do this with about 100 machines, no single point of failure, supported by distributed service architecture that that responds to over 2B requests a day, and a data warehouse of over 20TB that is used to drive email campaigns, SEM, and general reporting. We are a Linux/Java/Apache/Tomcat/Postgres/Lucene shop, and have built our own distributed computing architecture. We also maintain duplicate data centers (one active, one standby) for redundancy and maintenance purposes.

Too bad, it sounds like it would have been a good article.

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Sponsored Post: Aconex, Hadapt, Mathworks, AppDynamics, ScaleOut, Membase, CloudSigma, ManageEngine, Site24x7

Who's Hiring?

• Aconex is looking for a Systems Engineer in San Bruno. Please apply here.
• Hadapt brings high-performance SQL to Hadoop, and is looking for a systems engineer to join this fast-growing company. Please apply at http://www.hadapt.com/jobs.
• MathWorks Looking for Multiple, Full-time Scaling Experts. Apply now: http://matlab.my/lVmunb 

Fun and Informative Events

• Couchbase is having a Special Offer for Apache CouchDB Developer Training! http://www.couchbase.com/couchdb-training/portland-june-2011

Cool Products and Services

• 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.
• ScaleOut StateServer - Scale Out Your Server Farm Applications! 
• 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...

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Automation on AWS with Ruby and Puppet

This is a guest post by Frédéric Faure (architect at Ysance), you can follow him on twitter.

Urbandive is an immersive view service launched by the French YellowPages which allows you to travel in cities in France thanks to a 360° view. Urbandive focuses on providing high definition pictures and accurate professional and social content. One of the biggest jobs was to enable a fast scalable architecture, because it was really difficult to forecast the traffic load at production time. Traffic load may be influenced if the service receives attention from users as a result of advertising.

Below you will find a summary of the goals we achieve by using a Ruby scheduler built on top of Puppet on AWS to create a complete infrastructure.

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