Scalability stories for Oct 22, 2007

  • Why most large-scale sites which scale are not written in java ?  -  ( What nine of the world's largest websites are running on) -  A couple of very interesting blogs to read.
  • Slashdot's setup Part 1 - Just in time for the 10 year anniversary.
  • Flexiscale - Looks like an amazon competitor in the hosting business.
  • Pownce - Lessons learned  - Lessons learned while developing Pownce, a social messaging web application
  • Amazon's Dynamo - Dynamo is internal technology developed at Amazon to address the need for an incrementally scalable, highly-available key-value storage system. The technology is designed to give its users the ability to trade-off cost, consistency, durability and performance, while maintaining high-availability. [ PDF ]. This paper presents the design and implementation of Dynamo, a highly available key-value storage system that some of Amazon’s core services use to provide an “always-on” experience.  To achieve this level of availability, Dynamo sacrifices consistency under certain failure scenarios. It makes extensive use of object versioning and application-assisted conflict resolution in a manner that provides a novel interface for developers to use.
  • Client side loadbalancing - Not a good idea if you don't know what you are getting into. But there are certain kinds of application which can benifit from this. BTW DNS,SMTP,NTP already have some kind of client side loadbalancing features implemented.

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