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
View more presentations from jbellis.

Scalability is not improving latency, but increasing throughput
But overall performance shouldn’t degrade
Throw [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

If you are like me, you are already following all the talks and presentations published on YouTube. But if you have not been, nothing stops you from starting now. A new “Videos” page has been added to this blog to list the latest YouTube videos related to scalable web architectures.
Videos related to scalable web [...]

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 [...]

Web page caching gets tricky once personalization is involved. Lets take twitter public_timeline for example which seems to be perfect for caching. Unfortunately when a user is logged in, it also shows the user’s information. Caching that particular page in its entirety, on the web server, in such scenarios, may not be an option. Another [...]

I’m so locked up in my own java world that I didn’t realize something as cool as this existed in the ruby world.
Heroku is the instant ruby platform. Deploy any ruby app instantly with a simple and familiar git push. Take advantage of advanced features like HTTP caching, memcached, rack middleware, and instant scaling [...]

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 [...]