Posts

Showing posts from January 24, 2010

Scalability Killers (The art of scalability)

Image
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 methodologies to fix problems Too little caching, too late Overreliance on Third parties to scale

Private clouds not the future ?

James Hamilton is one of the leaders in this industry and has written a very thought provoking post about private clouds not being the future . This is what he said about private clouds when compared to existing not-cloud solutions. A fix, Not the future (reference to an InformationWeek post) Runs at lower utilization levels Consumes more power Less efficient environmentally Runs at higher costs Though I believe in most of his comments, I’m not convinced with the generalization of the conclusions. In particular, what is the maximum number of servers one need to own, beyond which outsourcing will become a liability. I suspect this is not a very high number today, but will grow over time. Hardware costs : The scale at which Amazon buys infrastructure is just mind boggling, but organizations buying in bulk could get pretty good deal from those same vendors as well.  Its not clear to me how many servers one has to buy to get discounts like what amazon does.