BT

Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

Write for InfoQ

Topics

Choose your language

InfoQ Homepage Scalability Content on InfoQ

  • Insight into the Phases of Scaling

    Christopher Smith shared insight into approaching and solving the problems of scaling web applications in his presentation "The Five Stages of Scale" at Scale11x last month. In Christopher's presentation he made a case for approaching scaling in a stages with well defined components that are either added or optimized to improve the overall scale of a web application.

  • Chef 11 is Ready for Hyperscale

    Opscode released Chef 11 early this month with enhancements to its scalability to meet the demands of hyperscale web operations. Opscode rewrote the entire server core API in Erlang and at the same time kept it backward compatible. Opscode renamed the core server API "Erchef" to complement the rewrite in Erlang.

  • Learning to Scale Websites at Mozilla

    Mozilla is scaling websites from thousands to hundreds of millions of users through simple scaling patterns they have learned internally according to Brandon Burton, web operations engineer at Mozilla. The lessons learned include caching, scaling out web servers, asynchronous jobs, and databases.

  • How Alibaba Catered To $3 Billion Sales In A Day

    Chinese Ecommerce Giant, Alibaba, recently managed to sell $3 billion worth of product in a single 24 hour period. InfoQ got a chance to ask a few questions to Zhuang Zhuoran and Youtan, architects from Tmall and Taobao, about the challenges of handling such loads and how they meet them.

  • Avoiding Downtime When Cloud Services Fail

    Another AWS outage hit several large websites and their services last week. What can be done to avoid downtime? Architect for failover not just for scale.

  • Hybrid SQL-NoSQL Databases Are Gaining Ground

    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.

  • X-Mas Showcase: High Scalability and Usability Rule

    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.

  • NoSQL OODB with Smalltalk-based Ruby VM: MagLev 1.0 Released

    The MagLev project has released version 1.0 of their Ruby VM. The Ruby implementation is based on the GemStone/S Smalltalk VM which comes with GemStone's distributed cache, ACID transactions, and persistence system (OODB). InfoQ caught up with Monty Williams of the MagLev project to talk about where MagLev fits on the NoSQL spectrum, and much more.

  • SQL Azure Database Scalability with Federations

    Cihan Biyikoglu introduced an upcoming feature for scalability in SQL Azure databases called Federations at Tech Ed 2011. Federations are objects inside the database which allow the data in their contained tables to be distributed across additional databases called federation members. Data can be re-distributed across Federation members at run-time.

  • Akka 1.1 Released, Brings Many Improvements to Futures and Performance, Reduces Dependencies,

    Akka 1.1 was released with many improvements in performance, Futures and more. The basic Akka also has no dependencies except for Scala 2.9. InfoQ caught up with Jonas Bonér to talk about the current state and the future of Akka.

  • Scalable System Design Patterns

    Ricky Ho revisited his three year old post on that question and realized that a lot had changed since then.

  • Designing a Web Application with Scalability in Mind

    Max Indelicato, a Software Development Director and former Chief Software Architect, has written a post on how to design a web application for scalability. He suggests choosing the right deploying and storage solution, a scalable data storage and schema, and using abstraction layers.

  • 7 Lessons Learned at Reddit

    Steve Huffman, co-founder of Reddit, shares the main lessons he learned scaling Reddit from a small web application to a large social website.

  • Terracotta and Eucalyptus Integration Provides Data Management and Elastic Provisioning in the Cloud

    Terracotta recently announced a partnership with open source private cloud platform vendor Eucalyptus that allows the companies to provision private clouds on Amazon AWS-compatible Eucalyptus cloud platform and take advantage of the elasticity and flexibility of the cloud.

  • Building Scalable Web Services

    Tom Killalea, Vice President of technology with responsibility for infrastructure and distributed systems engineering at Amazon.com wrote an article on ACM queue on building scalable web services. He outlines guiding principles to building scalable web services with a lot of real-world examples, the core theme of which is “build only what you need”.

BT