Pingdom has an interesting post which lists the various components which runs facebook. “Exploring the software behind Facebook, the world’s largest site” Few interesting statistics listed Facebook serves 570 billion page views per month (according to Google Ad Planner). There are more photos on Facebook than all other photo sites combined (including sites like Flickr). [...]

Top 10 scalability killers from The Art of scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for Modern Enterprise Thinking Scalability is just about technology Overuse of Synchronous calls Failure to weed or seed soon enough Inappropriate use of databases Cesspools instead of swim lanes Reliance on Vertical scale Failure to Learn from History Changing Development [...]

Amazon has published another “Best practices” document. This one covers the almost the entire collection of services. Its biased towards AWS (obviously), but its still one of the best description summary of the various services amazon offers today. Just the diagram above tells a lot about how the various AWS services interact with each other. [...]

Most software engineering organizations build applications with some hooks in place to allow functional tests. Some organizations continuously build and test all software automatically at check-in. And then there are those who have learnt from mistakes, and have built a suite of tests which get triggered at startup to look for problems which could indicate [...]

Picking a cloud service at times, unfortunately,  is far more complex  than picking up a brand new car. I remember how torn I was between a honda-hybrid, which came with some tax rebates and a carpool sticker and a non-hybrid one which was significantly cheaper. Understanding the short term and long term benefits is the [...]

This blog post is the result of my futile attempts at understanding how others have solved the problem of automatic service discovery. How do organizations, which have a huge collection of custom applications, design scalable web application without having to hardcode server names and port numbers in the configuration file ? I believe the terminology [...]

Its hard to say why I didn’t see this coming even after amazon launched hadoop and hive as a service. There is a huge demand for a relational database on the cloud and a lot of middlemen are raking a lot of cash. Today Amazon launches something they call “RDS“. The service basically provides a AWS managed [...]

Last year at VMware 2008 conference they discussed something called vCloud. Before VMware 2009, they will be announcing external clouds providers around that platform which allow internal clouds to extend their infrastructure to external clouds. What VMware is trying to do is allow organizations to build cloud networks with the possibility of moving few services/components [...]

Alex Barrera has a very interesting post about how frustrating it is to figure out that you have a problem and how much trouble it is to fix it after the product is live. I am there, I am suffering the redesign phase (twice now). It’s hard, it’s lonely, it’s discouraging and frustrating, but it [...]