Sometimes I can be a jackass about semantics. I don't always use the right words, but I should be corrected when I choose poorly. The reason we have so many of these word things is because most have outright different meanings and those that are synonymous have nuance that makes one more appropriate than another in a certain context. I deal with a lot of large systems and many large systems are complicated.

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So, I do a lot on the scalability front. I spend a lot of time reviewing people’s architectures and helping them understand how things can change to make sure that their data infrastructure can survive substantial growth. Scalability isn’t a new concept, but before 10 years ago, there was so much concentration on performance that people that specialized in the area of scalability had to make a point. What was that point?

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For those of you who know me, have seen me present or ever actually read all the various bits of my blog, you know that I've claimed to have been writing a book. In fact, it's been listed on Amazon for about two years. People have back ordered it there, and, I'm sure, feel like they will never get it. Well, the end has come. I have submitted all my materials to my publisher and it should be a matter of weeks before it goes to press.

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I’ve wanted to write a book for a while – mainly because people seemed genuinely interested in the presentations I have given over the past several years at the ApacheCon conferences. While my academic background and most of my project background is in the area of high-availability and resource allocation in clusters (i.e. load-balancing), it seemed that a book on it would either be too high level or too applied. The problem with high level conversation is that you end up boring people to death who are practical and not providing enough hands-on information to those that are engineers.

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Author's picture

Theo Schlossnagle

Distributed Systems, Scalability, and Operations. read more

CEO - Circonus

Maryland, USA