As requested, here is my slide stack bereft of wit and cynicism: Velocity 2010: Scalable Internet ArchitecturesView more presentations from postwait. I just finished my presentation at this year's Velocity Conference. Thank you all for the warm reception and the positive feedback. This year's conference is going to be awesome. If you didn't make it this year make sure you sign up early next year; Velocity is not an event to be missed.

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I've been attending conference in the "Internet space" regularly for about 12 years. I have enjoyed conferences about web technologies, open source, and programming languages technologies. Many, though not all, of the conferences I've enjoyed have been put on by O'Reilly — they put on some good shows. Over the last two years I have immensely enjoyed my involvement with the Velocity conference. It is, in my opinion, the de facto conference on web performance and operations.

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I'm exciting that the Universidade Federal de Goiás or Brazil has a course called: "Scalable Architectures for Large Scale Applications" in their Computer Science department. What's more? I'm very honored to learn that they are using my book as a part of their curriculum. I've added a venue for recruiting Site Reliability Engineers at OmniTI.

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So, you have an app. You can’t change the code. Now this isn’t the common case when I try to scale things. I usually roll up my sleeves and ignore application stack boundaries. This is a unique case where for political reasons, I can’t touch the app. So.. the app was a tiny little site, then it got popular on facebook and collegehumor and instead of pushing 5-10 megabits, it was falling apart at around 105 megabits due to resource saturation (one box wasn’t enough) and ended up needing to push 200 megabits.

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Oren Hurvitz has a great post about LinkedIn’s architecture. It’s well-written and well thought out. Their architecture has evolved on what appears to be a steady and safe path of improvement. It is well worth a read. I would like to comment on something I see repeated again and again and is likely misinterpreted by young scalability architects. The statement of what you should expect to lose when you scale up/out.

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Today’s Internet has changed quite a bit from the Internet I used to know. The Internet has always been successful because of net neutrality. What’s net neutrality? It’s complicated, but essentially it means that anyone anywhere can publish with equal rights. These aren’t the kind of rights people usually talk about… I’m not speaking of freedom of speech. Instead, I’m talking about content being simply bits. It doesn’t matter if it comes from CNN or this blog, you as a reader can download the bits that make up the pages you see without bias or preferential treatment.

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I just registered for OSCON. They say I should advertise that I am a speaker. Here goes. For the last several years, I've presented multiple talks at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference. My Scalable Internet Architectures talk has been quite popular and drawn large crowds. It is an interesting talk as it doesn't really change with time. As I say, "if principles of good engineering changed frequently, I'd never drive on bridges.

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Author's picture

Theo Schlossnagle

Distributed Systems, Scalability, and Operations. read more

CEO - Circonus

Maryland, USA