InfoQ

News

Presentation: Amazon CTO Werner Vogels on Availability and Consistency

Posted by Floyd Marinescu on Aug 08, 2007 11:23 AM

Community
Architecture
Topics
Deployment / Datacenter,
Design
Tags
Amazon
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. :)

11 comments

Reply

See more Architecture Qualities Sessions at QCon SF Nov 7-9 by Floyd Marinescu Posted Aug 8, 2007 11:32 AM
incomplete? by Zubin Wadia Posted Aug 8, 2007 10:38 PM
Re: incomplete? by Floyd Marinescu Posted Aug 9, 2007 11:49 AM
Re: incomplete? by ARI ZILKA Posted Aug 10, 2007 10:51 PM
Is it possible to download this Presentation? by eisen hower Posted Aug 12, 2007 9:16 AM
Re: Is it possible to download this Presentation? by Floyd Marinescu Posted Aug 13, 2007 5:26 PM
Re: Is it possible to download this Presentation? by ARI ZILKA Posted Aug 14, 2007 10:57 PM
Re: Is it possible to download this Presentation? by Brian Edwrads Posted Aug 15, 2007 12:59 AM
Re: Is it possible to download this Presentation? by Floyd Marinescu Posted Aug 15, 2007 3:06 PM
Re: Is it possible to download this Presentation? by Floyd Marinescu Posted Aug 15, 2007 3:07 PM
Blog post containing a summary by Chris Loosley Posted Aug 21, 2007 3:22 AM
  1. FYI, we are also running another architecture qualities track (where this video was recorded) at QCon San Francisco Nov 7-9, check it out!

  2. Back to top

    incomplete?

    Aug 8, 2007 10:38 PM by Zubin Wadia

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

  3. Back to top

    Re: incomplete?

    Aug 9, 2007 11:49 AM 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.

  4. Back to top

    Re: incomplete?

    Aug 10, 2007 10:51 PM by ARI ZILKA

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

  5. Back to top

    Is it possible to download this Presentation?

    Aug 12, 2007 9:16 AM by eisen hower

    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?

  6. Back to top

    Re: Is it possible to download this Presentation?

    Aug 13, 2007 5:26 PM by Floyd Marinescu

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

  7. 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!

  8. Back to top

    Re: Is it possible to download this Presentation?

    Aug 15, 2007 12:59 AM by Brian Edwrads

    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?

  9. Back to top

    Re: Is it possible to download this Presentation?

    Aug 15, 2007 3:06 PM 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.

  10. Back to top

    Re: Is it possible to download this Presentation?

    Aug 15, 2007 3:07 PM by Floyd Marinescu

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

  11. Back to top

    Blog post containing a summary

    Aug 21, 2007 3:22 AM 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].

Exclusive Content

Rob Windsor on WCF with REST, JSON and RSS

WCF is not just for SOAP based services and can be used with popular protocols like RSS, REST and JSON. Join Rob Windsor as he introduces WCF 3.5 and its new native support for non-SOAP services.

Christophe Coenraets Discusses Flex 3, AIR, and BlazeDS

Christophe Coenraets discusses Flex 3, Flex Builder, AIR, BlazeDS, Adobe and open source, integrating Flex with existing applications, and integrating RIAs with search engines and browsers.

Debunking Common Refactoring Misconceptions

Danijel Arsenovski attempts to dispel some of the myths around refactoring and how it applies to .NET developers.

REST Eye for the SOA Guy

In this presentation, recorded at QCon San Francisco, CORBA guru Steve Vinoski explains REST from the view of someone who comes to SOA from a traditional, RPC-oriented background.

Choose Feature Teams over Component Teams for Agility

Feature teams are key to scaling agility for large teams. In an excerpt from "Scaling Lean and Agile Development," Larman & Vodde show how feature teams resolve traditional problems & raise new issues

Billy Newport explains Virtualization

Billy Newport talks about virtualization, eXtreme Transaction Processing (XTP) and WebSphere Virtual Enterprise. He discusses hardware, hypervisor, JVM, application and data virtualization.

Virtualization and Security

While virtualization provides many benefits, security can not be a forgotten concept in its application.

Introduction to Agile for Traditional Project Managers

This session is specifically aimed at traditionally trained project managers who are new to Agile, and who would like to be able to relate the PMI's best practices to their Agile equivalents.