This is a guest post by Cihan Biyikoglu, Director of Product Management at Couchbase. Question: A few million people are out looking for a setup to efficiently live and interact. What is the most optimized architecture they can use? Build one giant high-rise for everyone,Build many single-family homes ORBuild something in between?Schools, libraries, retail stores, corporate HQs, homes are all ther

« Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For July 11th, 2014 | Main | Sponsored Post: Surge, Apple, Dreambox, Chartbeat, Monitis, Netflix, Salesforce, Blizzard Entertainment, Cloudant, CopperEgg, Logentries, Gengo, ScaleOut Software, Couchbase, MongoDB, BlueStripe, AiScaler, Aerospike, LogicMonitor, AppDynamics, ManageEngine, Site24x7 » “You just can't have it all” is a phrase that most of us are

This is the third guest post  (part 1, part 2) of a series by Greg Lindahl, CTO of blekko, the spam free search engine. Previously, Greg was Founder and Distinguished Engineer at PathScale, at which he was the architect of the InfiniPath low-latency InfiniBand HCA, used to build tightly-coupled supercomputing clusters. blekko's home-grown NoSQL database was designed from the start to support a web

Michael Stonebraker sure knows how to stir up a storm. Unlike for others, that doesn't make him a troll in my mind, he's way too accomplished in the field to be that, but he does have a bit of Barnum & Bailey in him, which serves to get the discussion flowing, and that's a good thing. A lot of previously hidden wisdom and passion unlocks, which we'll try to capture here. This disturbance in the fo

What should the architecture of your scalable, real-time, highly available service look like? There are as many options as there are developers, but if you are looking for a general template, this architecture as described by Prashant Malik, Facebook's lead for the Messages back end team, in Scaling the Messages Application Back End, is a very good example to consider. Although Messages is tasked

With BigData comes BigStorage costs. One way to store less is simply not to store the same data twice. That's the radically simple and powerful notion behind data deduplication. If you are one of those who got a good laugh out of the idea of eliminating SQL queries as a rather obvious scalability strategy, you'll love this one, but it is a powerful feature and one I don't hear talked about outside

The Relational Cloud Project is an effort by a group of researchers at MIT to investigate technologies and challenges related to Database-as-a-Service within cloud-computing. They are trying to figure out how the advantages of the DaaS (Database-as-a-Service) model, that we've seen arise in other areas like OLAP and NoSQL, can be applied to relational databases. The DaaS advantages as they see the

How do you keep a system small enough, while still being successful, that a simple scale-up strategy becomes the preferred architecture? StackOverflow, for example, could stick with a tool chain they were comfortable with because they had a natural brake on how fast they could grow: there are only so many programmers in the world. If this doesn't work for you, here's another natural braking strate