(2007-10-22) Hoffman Scalability

Jason Hoffman of Joyent on building for Scalability (at [z2007-10-01-NycStartupCamp])

• (expect to spend 10% of your revenue on operational costs: he's definitely including Managed Hosting and Band-Width, but does that also include SysAdmin labor? Dev team?)

• leverage DNS

  • put static content under separate host-name/sub-domain

    • eventually you might outsource this to CDN, or Amazon S3

    • plan from the start for a hash-driven File System (think I have the label wrong - is BigTable similar idea?), to avoid having more than 10k children of any node

• each Layer you add to your Infrastructure should provide 10x leverage of the layer below

  • Apache reverse-CachingProxyServer fails that test.

• uses 2 caches:

  • in front of your Application Server: Varnish

  • between the app-server and the Data Base:

    • MemCached

    • ObjectData Base?

    • probable end-game: In-Memory Data Store, just stream to RDBMS for Back Up

• avoid state (Shared-Nothing): stuff all session data into Web Cookie