Presentation: Amazon CTO Werner Vogels on Availability and Consistency

Posted by Floyd Marinescu on Aug 08, 2007

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Amazon CTO Werner Vogels says that due to the slow rate of technology adoption, some of the problems faced by large shops like Amazon don't have solutions in commercial products, as a result Werner mentions that solutions have to be found by looking into research as well as doing a lot of in-house innovation to scale, and in this session presents some of their lessons learned which Werner says "may be important to think about when scaling your own systems."  The session was recorded at QCon London, InfoQ's first conference held in March this year. We are also running another QCon in San Francisco Nov 7-9th.

Watch Availability & Consistency (52 min).

Werner starts defining his view of scalability, and explains the needs of modern internet systems and how they are different from the ACID properties of classic distributed systems. Among others Werner also presents a number of best practices for service design: Autonomy, Asynchrony, Controlled concurrency, Controlled parallelism, Decentralize, Decompose into small well-understood building blocks, Failure tolerant, Local responsibility, Recovery Built-in, Simplicity, and Symmetry.  You'll have to watch the presentation to figure out what these are. :)

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   See more Architecture Qualities Sessions at QCon SF Nov 7-9

   by Floyd Marinescu

   FYI, we are also running another architecture qualities track (where this video was recorded) at QCon San Francisco Nov 7-9, check it out!

   Reply

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   incomplete?

   by Zubin Wadia

   Floyd,
   
   Is there going to be more to this webinar? It cut off at a critical juncture :).
   
   Cheers,
   
   Zubin.

   Reply

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   Re: incomplete?

   by Floyd Marinescu

   Hi Zubin, the sessions at QCon were only 60 min long and this video has 52 min, which including all the editing already done is likely to actually be the whole presenation minus one or two minutes which for some reason were missed. I'll have this looked into, but unfortunately it may not be resolved quickly.

   Reply

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   Re: incomplete?

   by ARI ZILKA

   Yes.
   
   I was there @ QCon, London. Werner gave an amazing talk but he ran out of time. Definitely frustrating.

   Reply

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   Is it possible to download this Presentation?

   by hower eisen

   Hi Floyd! The presentation system DOSE NOT works smoothly in my laptop with my ASL about 2M brandwidth. Is it possible to let us to watch InfoQ's presentation in off-portal style?

   Reply

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   Re: Is it possible to download this Presentation?

   by Floyd Marinescu

   Unfortunately not. We are planning a move away from flash streaming eventually which should hopefully help.

   Reply

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   Re: Is it possible to download this Presentation?

   by ARI ZILKA

   Unfortunately not. We are planning a move away from flash streaming eventually which should hopefully help.

   
   
   AHHH!
   
   Terracotta is working with Red5 on clustered scalable streaming flash servers in OSS. You should TOTALLY wait!

   Reply

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   Re: Is it possible to download this Presentation?

   by Brian Edwards

   I like the flash as opposed to some other technology like Real or quicktime. Why not just partner/or use YouTube? YouTube is proven and works across most platforms. There seems to be a problem with resuming the stream with the current player which has always annoyed me. Also why is there always that white pixel in the upper-left quadrant?

   Reply

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   Re: Is it possible to download this Presentation?

   by Floyd Marinescu

   I would love to but I youtube doesn't seem to have any solution for securing our videos so that they can only be seen on InfoQ. We don't want these accessible at any URL other than one on InfoQ, or else we don't benefit from the investment of filming and distributing them.

   Reply

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    Re: Is it possible to download this Presentation?

    by Floyd Marinescu

    Just to clarify, we are looking to move from flash streaming to flash progressive download with seek support (like google video).

    Reply

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    Blog post containing a summary

    by Chris Loosley

    I found this presentation so stimulating that I spent a day writing up a detailed summary of it, as part of a series I am writing on system performance and asynchronous architecture. See Asynchronous Architectures [4].

    Reply

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