This article describes the idea of a website asset service for the author's dynamic websites. It deals as a request for comments and also as a request for hints to existing 3rd party software.

Advertising for the Super Bowl is bigger than the game for many viewers. So you gotta figure advertisers are ready for the traffic bursts generated by their expensive ads? Not exactly...

Yottaa reports an amazing 13 advertiser websites crashed during the Super Bowl. Coke was interactively au currant, asking viewers to vote for the ending of a commercial, but load times went to 62 seconds. SodaStream, Calvin Klein, Axe, Got Milk? The Walking Dead, many movie sites, and many car sites, all were flagged with delay of fame penalties.

Lots of time, money, and creative energy is spent lovingly perfecting every detail of these commercials. It won't be a surprise to any programmer that this can't usually be said of the follow through on the backend.

So what can you do? Yottaa has some good tips and Michael Hamrah has a wonderful post on dealing with the Super Bowl Burst Problem:

Hi everybody

I'm wondering what you would do: I develop a webapp using Grails, Memcached and Mysql as persistence. Now, I have following domain classes (simplified):

Product: Can be in one category
Category: Can have nested children, and have multiple products.

I need to access all product objects by id which led me to the idea to store all products in one big Memcached-entry with a key: PRODUCTMAP and as value, all product attributes as array, like: [productId1: [title: 'title'], productId2: [title: 'title']]

If I browse to category 4, I simply get my map categoryMap with value [cateoryId: [productId1, productId2]]
I also can list all products of a certain category by providing that id. 

The bad thing about this is that I always have to put back everything if I modify a single product.

Who can give advice how to realize that?
Any help will be appreciated! 

Thanks,

Best
Sullivan 

 

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Amazon created a whole new class of service with their Provisioned IOPS for RDS, EBS, and DynamoDB. The idea is simple. If you want more performance, you turn a dial up. If you want less, you turn a dial down. A beautifully simple model. You pay for the performance you want, which is different than their previous cloud model, where performance varied, but you paid only for what you used. 

The question: Do these higher priced services really work better?

Rodrigo Campos put this question to the test (only for EBS) by running a benchmark he describes in IOMelt Provisioned IOPS EBS Benchmark Results - December 2012.

The result? Yes, AWS Provisioned IOPS Volumes Really Deliver More Consistent and Higher Performance IO:

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

• 400 milliseconds : modern private wire for Natural Gas; 620,000: size of a mobile phone botnet; 1 million cores: jet noise modeling supercomputer; 2.2 petabytes per gram: DNA with storage density; 1 billion: Google's one quarter infrastructure spend
• Quotable Quotes:
  • @StartupLJackson: "Good thing we spent 6mo on scalability pre-launch. The thing went hyper-viral day one, just as planned." - nobody ever.
  • @dysinger: WELCOME TO DEVOPS ADVENTURE! YOU ARE STANDING INSIDE AWS. NEARBY IS AN ANGRY ELB. THERE ARE SOME SSH KEYS ON THE GROUND.
  • ~‏@levie: Well cloud computing was fun while it lasted; now we can just store all our data in DNA strands.
  • @mtnygard: Debates about “Tech X > tech T” aren’t religious wars. They’re also economic wars.
  • @alfonsol: I do not believe your per load number of socks requires scalability.
  • @mikeolson: Latency breeds contempt.
• Next step after service orientation? Symbioses. The world swarms with symbiosis. 
• How EVE Online servers deal with a 3,000 person battle. There's nothing to throttle as servers run at 100%. The game is sharded by solar system, multiple solar systems run on a machine are moved when a machine becomes overloaded. Some games are run on machines with exceptional hardware. The trickiest strategy to deal with large battles is time dialation, time is slown down. Interesting discussion on Hacker News about game design,  bandwidth requirements and state management techniques. 

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