Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For May 20, 2011

Submitted for your reading pleasure on this beautiful morning: 

• Group Decision Making in Honey Bee Swarms. In distributed computing systems nodes reach a quorum when deciding what to do as a group. It turns out bees also use quorum logic when deciding on where to nest! Bees do it a bit differently of course:  A scout bee votes for a site by spending time at it, somehow the scouts act and interact so that their numbers rise faster at superior sites, and somehow the bees at each site monitor their numbers there so that they know whether they've reached the threshold number (quorum) and can proceed to initiating the swarm's move to this site. Ants use similar mechanisms to control foraging. Distributed systems may share common mechanisms based on their nature as being a distributed system,  the components may not matter that much.
• Fire! Fire!  Brent Chapman shows how to put that IT fire out in Incident Command for IT: What We Can Learn from the Fire Department. 
• Scale Fail (part 1). Josh Berkus warns against hopping on the trendy train: Scaling an application is all about management of resources and administrative repeatability. Use data so that you work on real unknowns instead of unknown unknowns. And blocking processes, just don't do it.
• Quotable quotes:
  • @Sri_few_words: Every 600 phones, means a new server in data center" - Cloud Computing being driven strongly by smartphones; tablets

There's a lot more Stuff the Internet says, don't be left out, read more below...

Click to read more ...

Zynga's Z Cloud - Scale Fast or Fail Fast by Merging Private and Public Clouds

Release early and often. A/B testing. Creating a landing page and buying ads on AdSense. All are ways of providing quick feedback in order to validate an idea. If you are like Zynga, with 250 million active users a month, how do you cost effectively prove out a game that could flop or get 90 million users (like CityVille) in an instant?

Zynga handles this problem inlle an innovative way, by inverting the typical cloud burst scenario that has excess traffic flowing from a datacenter to a cloud, to having a game start in the cloud and then moving to the datacenter once the game has proved popular enough to keep.

This process is nicely described by Charles Babcock in Lessons From FarmVille: How Zynga Uses The Cloud, in an interview with Allan Leinwand, CTO of infrastructure engineering at Zynga.

When paired down to its essence, Zynga's strategy goes something like this:

Click to read more ...

Facebook: An Example Canonical Architecture for Scaling Billions of Messages

What should the architecture of your scalable, real-time, highly available service look like? There are as many options as there are developers, but if you are looking for a general template, this architecture as described by Prashant Malik, Facebook's lead for the Messages back end team, in Scaling the Messages Application Back End, is a very good example to consider. 

Although Messages is tasked with handling 135+ billion messages a month, from email, IM, SMS,  text messages, and Facebook messages, you may think this is an example of BigArchitecture and doesn't apply to smaller sites. Not so. It's a good, well thought out example of a non-cloud architecture exhibiting many qualities any mom would be proud of:

Click to read more ...

Sponsored Post: Animoto, deviantART, Hadapt, Clustrix, Percona, Mathworks, AppDynamics, ScaleOut, Cloudkick, Membase, CloudSigma, ManageEngine, Site24x7

Who's Hiring?

• Animoto is building a Systems (DevOps) Team. Please apply here. 
• Clustrix Inc. - Learn more about Clustrix's interpretation of NewSQL. Please apply here.
• deviantART is looking for Network and Systems Operations Engineer. 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

• Percona is running an intensive one-day MySQL conference in New York City on May 26th.  High Scalability readers save $50 with the code PLNY-HiSc. Learn more and register at percona.com/live/.
• CouchDB Developer Training coming to Washington, D.C., Portland, San Francisco and Chicago! 
  Membase Server Ops Training coming to New York City and San Francisco!

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! 
• Newrelic - What are you doing to ensure the performance of your apps?
• Cloudkick - monitor & manage your serverside better with a FREE Cloudkick developer account.
• 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 May 13, 2011

Submitted for your reading pleasure on this beautiful blue sky, birds chirping Friday morning: 

• Unlocked Achievements: Twitter: 900,000 Apps, 600,000 Developers And 13 Billion API Requests Per Day; Rackspace Now Has 70,000 Servers
• Quotable Quotes for the speed of light Alex:
  • @LusciousPear According to everyone I talk to, in aggregate, every single #nosql company is irrelevant, doing great, making tons of money, and broke.
  • XIX Give a man a GO compiler and he eats for a day. Give a man a C compiler and he feeds upon php/python/jscript/lua/etc for the rest of his life.
  • @movingsideways This tweet features a robust architecture and high scalability.
  • @serenestudios  Human touch trumps code 'scalability'? People matter more than code - we agree.
  For more Stuff the Internet says please read on...

  Click to read more ...

Paper: Mind the Gap: Reconnecting Architecture and OS Research

Mind the Gap: Reconnecting Architecture and OS Research is a paper presented at HotOS XIII, the place where researchers talk about making potential futures happen. For a great overview of the conference take a look at this article by Matt Welsh: Conference report: HotOS 2011 in Napa.

In the VM/cloud age I question the need of having an OS at all, programs can compile directly against "raw" hardware, but the paper does a good job of trying to figure out the new roll operating systems can play in the future. We've been in a long OS holding pattern, so long that we've seen the rise of PaaS vendors skipping the OS level abstraction completely, but there's room for a middle ground between legacy time sharing systems of the past and service level APIs that are but one possible future.

Introduction:

Click to read more ...

Viddler Architecture - 7 Million Embeds a Day and 1500 Req/Sec Peak

Viddler is in the high quality Video as a Service business for a customer who wants to pay a fixed cost, be done with it, and just have it work. Similar to Blip and Ooyala, more focussed on business than YouTube. They serve thousands of business customers, including high traffic websites like FailBlog, Engadget, and Gawker.

Viddler is a good case to learn from because they are a small company trying to provide a challenging service in a crowded field. We are catching them just as they transitioning from a startup that began in one direction, as a YouTube competitor, and pivoted into a slightly larger company focussed on paying business customers.

Transition is the key word for Viddler: transitioning from a free YouTube clone to a high quality paid service. Transitioning from a few colo sites that didn't work well to a new higher quality datacenter. Transitioning from an architecture that was typical of a startup to one that features redundancy, high availability, and automation. Transitioning from a lot of experiments to figuring out how they want to do things and making that happen. Transition to an architecture where features were spread out amongst geographically distributed teams using different technology stacks to having clear defined roles.

In other words, Viddler is like most every other maturing startup out there and that's fun to watch. Todd Troxell, Systems Architect at Viddler, was kind enough to give us an interview and share the details on Viddler's architecture. It's an interesting mix of different technologies, groups, and processes, but it somehow seems to all work. It works because behind all the moving parts is the single idea: making the customer happy and giving them what they want, no matter what. That's not always pretty, but it does get results.

Site: Viddler.com

The Stats

Click to read more ...

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For May 6th, 2011

Submitted for your reading pleasure...Hi Mom!...

• We don't need no stinking servers says the W3C. This Could be Big: Decentralized Web Standard Under Development by W3C by Marshall Kirkpatrick. Browsers talking to directly to other browsers. Marshall is right, this could be very big.
• Quotable Quotes for Pi Alex:
  • @eric_brewer The Amazon outage & CAP theorem: http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648/ (partition is the root cause)
  • @kylecordes A problem with cloud hosting (EC2) is that it brings the problems of scalability to systems that *don't* need scalability.
  • @virtualpete Last month everyone was a nuclear physicist. Today everyone is a web scalability architect
  • @jfelipe We cannot overlook migration/federation issues (scalability) in cloud tech: open standards are a plus compared 2 closed (Amazon)
  • @lapsu Stored procedures aren't so bad if you write them in Javascript & they do MapReduce. That makes them cool. #nosql
• Adapteva wants your tablet and phone to have 64 processors. What can you do with all that power? Process the world around you in real-time. Analyzing sound, video, making sense of it, embedding you in a data enchanted world. That's one option anyway.

For a lot more Stuff the Internet Says please read below...

Click to read more ...

Paper: A Study of Practical Deduplication

With BigData comes BigStorage costs. One way to store less is simply not to store the same data twice. That's the radically simple and powerful notion behind data deduplication. If you are one of those who got a good laugh out of the idea of eliminating SQL queries as a rather obvious scalability strategy, you'll love this one, but it is a powerful feature and one I don't hear talked about outside the enterprise. A parallel idea in programming is the once-and-only-once principle of never duplicating code.

Using deduplication technology, for some upfront CPU usage, which is a plentiful resource in many systems that are IO bound anyway, it's possible to reduce storage requirements by upto 20:1, depending on your data, which saves both money and disk write overhead. 

This comes up because of really good article Robin Harris of StorageMojo wrote, All de-dup works, on a paper,  A Study of Practical Deduplication by Dutch Meyer and William Bolosky, 

For a great explanation of deduplication we turn to Jeff Bonwick and his experience on the ZFS Filesystem:

Click to read more ...

Sponsored Post: Percona, Mathworks, AppDynamics, Gazillion, Edmunds, OPOWER, ClearStone, ScaleOut, aiCache, WAPT, Karmasphere, Newrelic, Cloudkick, Membase, CloudSigma, ManageEngine, Site24x7

Who's Hiring?

• MathWorks Looking for Multiple, Full-time Scaling Experts. Apply now: http://matlab.my/lVmunb
• Gazillion Entertainment is looking for a Web Developer Generalist to work on massively multiplayer online games. Please apply here. 
• Edmunds.com helps people find the car that meets their every need.  We’re currently hiring talented Java Developers in the Los Angeles area.
• OPOWER motivates millions to become more energy efficient, and we're hiring!

Fun and Informative Events

• Percona is running an intensive one-day MySQL conference in New York City on May 26th.  High Scalability readers save $50 with the code PLNY-HiSc. Learn more and register at percona.com/live/.
• Interested in CouchDB or MembaseTraining? CouchOne just announced dates for our CouchDB Developer and Membase Server Ops Training. Click here to learn more or register today.

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.
• APM (Application Performance Management) for NOSQL, Java and More - Try ClearStone 5.0. Download ClearStone 5.0 today!  http://www.evidentsoftware.com/download/
• ScaleOut StateServer - Scale Out Your Server Farm Applications!
• aiCache creates a better user experience by increasing the speed scale and stability of your web-site. 
• WAPT is a load, stress and performance testing tool for websites and web-based applications.
• Karmasphere is bringing Apache Hadoop power to developers and analysts. Download your Free Community Edition today!
• Newrelic - What are you doing to ensure the performance of your apps?
• Cloudkick - monitor & manage your serversde better with a FREE Cloudkick developer account.
• 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 sponser please read more below...

Click to read more ...