This is a very interesting talk by Jonathan Ellis on database scalability. He designed and implemented multi-petabyte storage for Mozy and is currently the project chair for Apache Cassandra.

What every developer should know about database scalability, PyCon 2010
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Scalability is not improving latency, but increasing throughput
But overall performance shouldn’t degrade
Throw [...]

Large distributed systems run into a problem which smaller systems don’t usually have to worry about. “Brewers CAP Theorem” [ Ref 1] [ Ref 2] [ Ref 3]  defines this problem in a very simple way.
It states, that though its desirable to have Consistency, High-Availability and Partition-tolerance in every system, unfortunately no system can [...]

While PHP is very popular, it unfortunately doesn’t perform as some of its competitors. One of the ways to make things faster is to write PHP Extensions in C++. In this post we will describe two different ways developers can solve this problem and the milage you might get from either model may vary.
Since Facebook [...]

Windows Azure is an application platform provided by Microsoft to allow others to run applications on Microsoft’s “cloud” infrastructure. Its finally open for business (as of Feb 1, 2010). Below are some links about Azure for those who are still catching up.
Wikipedia: Windows Azure has three core components: Compute, Storage and Fabric. As the names [...]

While “private clouds may not be the future” they are definitely needed today. Here are some of the top issues bothering some organizations which have been thinking about going into the cloud. Some of issues were based on Craig Bolding’s talk on “Guide to cloud security”.

Unlike your own data center, you will never know [...]

Hive is a data warehouse infrastructure built over Hadoop. It provides tools to enable easy data ETL, a mechanism to put structures on the data, and the capability to querying and analysis of large data sets stored in Hadoop files. Hive defines a simple SQL-like query language, called QL, that enables users familiar with SQL [...]

Designing any scalable web architecture would be incomplete without investigating “load balancers”.  There used to be a time when selecting and installing load balancers was an art by itself. Not anymore.
A lot of organizations today, use Apache web servers as a proxy server (and also as a load balancer) for the backend application clusters. Though [...]

My last post was about my struggle to find a good distributed ESB/Service-discovery solution built over open source tools which was simple to use and maintain. Thanks to reader comments (Dan especially) and some other email exchanges, it seems like building a custom solution is unavoidable if I really want to keep things simple.
Dan suggested [...]

For the last couple of weekends I’ve been playing with Google App Engine, (Java edition) and was pleasantly surprised at the direction it has taken. I was also fortunate enough to see some Google Engineers talk on this subject at Google I/O which helped me a lot to compile all this information.
But before I [...]

A few years ago I wrote a simple online bookmarking tool called Flagthis. The tool allowed one to bookmark sites using a javascript bookmarklet from the bookmark tab. The problem it was trying to solve is that most links people bookmark are never used again if they are not checked out within the next few [...]