Martin Thompson and David Farley discuss how to use the scientific method to create high performance systems by measuring performance and adapting the implementation to approach the limits of current hardware. The disruptor architecture is an open sourced result of their work at low-latency, high throughput systems for the retail trading platform of LMAX Ltd.
Hybrid SQL-NoSQL database solutions combine the advantage of being compatible with many SQL applications and providing the scalability of NoSQL ones. Xeround offers such a solution as a service in the cloud, including a free edition. Other solutions: Database.com with ODBC/JDBC drivers, NuoDB, Clustrix, and VoltDB.
Who ever has wondered what kind of software is used by Santa Claus & Co, got a hint recently in youtube. This might irritate some software engineers who have assumed, Santa Claus would only use Open Source Software.
Martin Abbott and Michael Fisher's book, Scalability Rules, is a compilation of 50 rules for scaling applications based on experience garnered at eBay, Intuit, PayPal, Etsy, Folica and Salesforce. The book is a handy reference for experienced and novice architects, managers, developers and operations personnel through a mix of heuristics and a priority-benefit model to rank the rules.
During my 2011 QCon London keynote on "Scaling Lean & Agile: Large, Multisite or Offshore Delivery", I mentioned — as an aside — that, "Architecture is a bad metaphor. We don't construct our software like a building, we grow it like a garden." This prompted many a tweet, and some people were interested in clarification or elaboration.
Jonas Bonér introduces Akka, a JVM platform that wants to address the complex problems of concurrency, scalability and fault tolerance using Actors, STM and self-healing from crashes.
Thor Muller presents how Get Satisfaction managed to reliably scale their Ruby on Rails-based customer community platform using Agile, TDD, BDD, and by deploying their framework in the cloud.
Jonas Bonér and Kresten Krab Thorup discuss some key aspects of Erlang like fault tolerance and reliability and how the Akka and Erjang projects try to bring them to the JVM.
Ulf Wiger explains the origins of some of Erlang's core principles and how they're even more relevant today. Also: a look at the strengths of Erlang, Clojure and Haskell.
