Todd pinged me to see how I felt about antirez’s suggession in his post titled “On the webserver scalability and speed are almost the same thing“. While I disagree with parts of the post, I can understand why he believed what he wrote. If someone were to design a state of the art scalable webserver in [...]

Sysadmins love infrastructure control, and I have to say that there was a time when root access gave me a high. It wasn’t  until I moved to web operations team (and gave up my root access) that I realized that I was  more productive when I wasn’t dealing with day to day hardware and OS [...]

The complete announcement is here, but here are the changes for the java SDK. The two big changes I liked is the fact that there is now an “always on” feature, and “tasks” feature has graduated out of beta/testing. The Always On feature allows applications to pay and keep 3 instances of their application always [...]

I’ve seen a number of posts from Netflix folks talking about their architecture in the recent weeks. And part of that is due to an ongoing effort to expand their business for which they seem to be hiring like crazy. Here is the yet another interesting deck of slides which mentions stuff across both Dev [...]

Building your first web application on AWS is like shopping for a car at pepboys, part by part. While manuals to build one might be on aisle 5, the experience of having built one already is harder to buy. Here are some interesting logistical questions, which I don’t think get enough attention, when people discuss [...]

I had briefly blogged about this presentation before from Velocity 2010. I wish they had released the video for this session. I went through this slide deck again today to see if Paul mentioned any of the problems organization like ours are dealing with in its transition from quarterly releases to weekly/continuous releases. One of [...]

It’s totally worth it. Erlang (Erlang/OTP really, which is what most people mean when they say “Erlang has X”) does out of the box a lot of things we would have had to either build from scratch or attempt to piece together existing libraries to do. Its dynamic type system and pattern matching (ala Haskelland [...]

I heard an unconfirmed rumor that facebook is moving away from Cassandra. Not sure why, or to what, but rumors like this is a concern regardless. After twitter‘s backing off, and digg’s troubles, which were indirectly linked to either Cassandra’s maturity as a production solution or their understanding of Cassandra’s capability, it might raise more eyebrows [...]

Scalability links for October 18th: Foursquare MongoDB Outage Post Mortem – Detailed analysis of what caused the foursquare (mongodb) outages. SURGE Recap – Interesting take aways from a scalability conference. The one new take away I noticed is “Make use of academic literature”. Netflix Migration to the Cloud – Very interesting (technical) information about why [...]

If you have read this blog before, you know how much I admire those who use continuous deployments in production. Doing that at scale is even more impressive. But the message which gets lost sometimes is that Continuous deployments may not be for everyone. Most continuous integration environments usually do all of their deployments from [...]