Restaurant Scalability

Could pro-waitering serve up some lessons on web scalability? Observing peak hour dining at a New York restaurant gave us some insight.

I was dining at a restaurant the other day with friends. It was a warm and cozy place, nicely decorated with a long, narrow dining room.  The food was scrumptious, yet we were getting increasingly frustrated by the service as the night went along.

With some waiting experience behind me, I could immediately see the problem. The waiters, probably through lack of experience, were making the mistake of doing one thing at a time.  They would go to a table, respond to one customer's request, and go and fetch that item.  Back and forth, back and forth they would dart, but always dealing with …

With the fast growth of virtualized data centers, and companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook, it's easy to forget how much is built on open-source components, aka commodity software.  In a very real way open-source has enabled the huge explosion of commodity hardware, the fast growth of the internet itself, and now the further acceleration through cloud services, cloud infrastructure, and virtualization of data centers.

Your typical internet stack and application now stands on the shoulders of tens of thousands of open source developers and projects.  Let's look at a few of them.

1. Operating System - Linux

The commodity hardware craze would never have happened without the help of an open-source operating system to run on it.  Linux is an old story now, nonetheless everything else stands on it's shoulders.

2. Multi-purpose Webserver - Apache

As of July …

If you're headhunting a cloud computing expert, specifically someone who knows Amazon Web Services (AWS) and EC2, you'll want to have a battery of questions to ask them to assess their knowledge.  As with any technical interview focus on concepts and big picture.  As the 37Signals folks like to say "hire for attitude, train for skill".  Absolutely!

1. Explain Elastic Block Storage?  What type of performance can you expect?  How do you back it up?  How do you improve performance?

EBS is a virtualized SAN or storage area network.  That means it is RAID storage to start with so it's redundant and fault tolerant.  If disks die in that RAID you don't lose data.  Great!  It is also virtualized, so you can provision and allocate storage, and attach it to your server with various API calls.  No calling the …

Modern internet infrastructure are complex.  Components and services are prone to failure.  Resiliency involves building redundancy, best practices and processes into your architecture to make you able to bend and not break.

• Migrating to cloud service providers
• Rearchitecting and refactoring applications to scale
• Scaling the database tier - MySQL and Oracle
• Building redundancy into every layer
• Deploying object caches - memcache
• Deploying page caches - varnish
• Migrating to Innodb - transactional storage engine
• Infrastructure design
• Infrastructure automation
• Disaster Recovery
• Business Continuity with cloud deployments

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1. Backup outside of the Cloud

Some of the high profile companies affected by Amazon's April 2011 outage could have recovered had they kept a backup of their entire site outside of the cloud.  With any hosting provider, managed traditional data center or cloud provider, alternate backups are always a good idea.  A MySQL logical backup and/or incremental backup can be copied regularly offsite or to an alternate cloud provider.  That's real insurance!

2. Use alternate regions and availability zones

Amazon's outage in April …