scalability

Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner In this case “baby” is load balancing and the corner is cloud computing. SocialCloudNow recently wrote up a pretty darn accurate (which is hard to find these days) description of “cloud computing” by walking through the components required. The author did an excellent job – especially where he dove into the relationship between orchestration and cloud computing. Loved that a lot – most folks ignore that piece of cloud computing even though it’s very, very important. But I was a bit put off (okay, a lot put off) at one statement: ... posted @ Monday, March 15, 2010 4:15 AM | Feedback (1)

Square Infrastructure Pegs Don’t Fit in Round Network Holes Ultimately a highly-scalable, high-performance architecture will rely on choosing the right form factor in the right places at the right time. Scale is not just about servers, and for corporate data centers and cloud computing providers looking to realize the benefits of rapid elasticity and on-demand provisioning scale simply must be one of the foundational premises upon which a dynamic data center is built. And that includes the infrastructure. This isn’t the first time I’ve touched upon this subject, but it’s a concept that needs to be reiterated – especially with so many pundits and analysts looking for the... posted @ Monday, March 01, 2010 3:53 AM | Feedback (1)

Lots of Little Virtual Web Applications Scale Out Better than Scaling Up Surprised? I was, but I shouldn’t have been. While working on other topics I ran across an interesting slide in a presentation given by Microsoft at TechEd Europe 2009 on virtualization and Exchange. Specifically the presenter called out the average 12% overhead incurred from the hypervisor on systems in internal testing. Intuitively it seems obvious that a hypervisor will incur overhead; it is, after all, an application that is executing and thus requires CPU, I/O, and RAM to perform its tasks. That led to me to wonder if there was more data on the overhead from other... posted @ Thursday, February 18, 2010 3:47 AM | Feedback (2)

The Devil is in the Details Or more apropos, it’s in the complex and intimate relationship between applications and their infrastructure. What’s the difference between a highly virtualized corporate data center and a cloud computing environment? There are probably many, but the most important distinction – and the one that earns the latter a “cloud computing” tag – is certainly that the former lacks a comprehensive orchestration system and was likely not architected using a rapid, infrastructure inclusive, scalability strategy. Mitch Garnaat, “The Elastician”, recently managed to sum up what should be every modern data center’s motto in a... posted @ Monday, February 15, 2010 4:06 AM | Feedback (2)

Scaling AJAX Applications is More About Architecture than Apache Scaling applications that include AJAX and non-AJAX components may require more than just tuning your web server  A common problem after deploying a Web 2.0 AJAX-based application shows itself through poor performance or lower capacity on the server, often both. Web serving tuning is almost always the first step in improving performance and capacity, but the inherently competing behavior of AJAX-requests and “normal” HTTP requests quickly becomes problematic as well. Tune for the AJAX requests and performance of regular old HTTP requests suffers. Tune for regular old HTTP requests, and performance of AJAX-requests suffer. This is... posted @ Monday, February 08, 2010 4:35 AM | Feedback (0)

The Question Shouldn’t Be Where are the Network Virtual Appliances but Where is the Architecture? We seem on the verge of repeating the mistakes associated with failed SOA implementations: ignoring the larger issue of architecture. Everyone – from pundit to public – is asking the same question: “Where are the network virtual appliances?” But fewer people seem to be asking a question that needs to go hand-in-hand with that one: “Where are the architectural guidelines to support deployment of network virtual appliances?” SOA has been deemed by many to be a failure in part because it lacked true architectural guidance. Architects were simply unable – whether by lack of skills or training or... posted @ Thursday, February 04, 2010 4:43 AM | Feedback (0)

How to Gracefully Degrade Web 2.0 Applications To Maintain Availability I haven’t heard the term “graceful degradation” in a long time, but as we continue to push the limits of data centers and our budgets to provide capacity it’s a concept we need to revisit. You might have heard that Twitter was down (again) last week. What you might not have heard (or read) is some interesting crunchy bits about how Twitter attempts to maintain availability by degrading capabilities gracefully when services are over capacity. “Twitter Down, Overwhelmed by Whales” from Data Center Knowledge offered up the juicy details: ... posted @ Wednesday, January 27, 2010 2:55 AM | Feedback (1)

Scaling Security in the Cloud: Just Hit the Reset Button Sometimes the best answer to a problem is to hit the reset button, but it should probably be the last answer, not the first. My cohort Pete Silva attended the 2009 Cloud Computing and Virtualization Conference & Expo and offered up a summary of one of the sessions he enjoyed (‘Cloud Security - It's Nothing New; It Changes Everything!’ (pdf)) in a recent post, “Virtualization is Real” One of the sessions I enjoyed was ‘Cloud Security - It's Nothing New; It Changes Everything!’ (pdf) from Glenn Brunette, a Distinguished Engineer and Chief... posted @ Friday, November 20, 2009 4:15 AM | Feedback (4)

Microsoft Exchange 2010: HELO New Architecture Microsoft has made some fairly substantial changes to the core architecture of Exchange 2010. Given that messaging can only be described as business critical today, it’s no surprise that many new aspects of Exchange 2010 and in particular its new architecture are designed to improve availability and management of its messaging systems. Exchange 2010 includes many changes to its core architecture. In Exchange 2010, new features such as incremental deployment, mailbox database copies, and database availability groups work with other features such as shadow redundancy and transport dumpster to provide a new, unified... posted @ Tuesday, November 10, 2009 3:27 AM | Feedback (1)

To Take Advantage of Cloud Computing You Must Unlearn, Luke. Carrying over the provisioning and capacity planning techniques used in a traditional data center to cloud computing negates the full power of the Force cloud computing. One of the benefits of cloud computing is supposed to be efficiency, particularly in the utilization of compute resources. Over-provisioning of compute resources has long been one way in which IT combats the need for scalability and availability of applications but this often leaves a large percentage of compute resources unused. The utilization rule once employed as a means to ensure availability and performance of applications, i.e. no device... posted @ Wednesday, October 28, 2009 3:32 AM | Feedback (4)

Vertical Scalability Cloud Computing Style Vertical scalability used to require optimizations inside the application, at the code level. Cloud computing changes the nature of vertical scalability and, one hopes, will lead to a new model of scalability based on the capabilities of Infrastructure 2.0 and increasingly granular resource management capabilities. RightScale recently offered up its own analysis of Amazon Usage Estimates and while the details they provide on Amazon usage from their vantage point is very interesting I found one of their related observations even more fascinating: In earlier days the predominant method of scaling was by... posted @ Tuesday, October 27, 2009 3:13 AM | Feedback (2)

The Cloud Is Not A Synonym For Cloud Computing “Where are you storing your data these days,” he asked casually after trying to come up with a better opening line but failing. “Ah, dahhling,” she drawled while gesturing in no particular direction with an almost deprecating wave of her hand. “The Cloud, where else?” Thanks to the nearly constant misapplication of the phrase “The Cloud” and the lack of agreement on a clear definition from technical quarters I must announce that “The Cloud” is no longer a synonym for “Cloud Computing”. It can’t be. Do not be misled into trying, it will only cause you... posted @ Wednesday, October 21, 2009 3:12 AM | Feedback (2)

Putting a Price on Uptime A lack of ability in the cloud to distinguish illegitimate from legitimate requests could lead to unanticipated costs in the wake of an attack. How do you put a price on uptime and more importantly, who should pay for it? A “Perfect Cloud”, in my opinion, would be one in which the cloud provider’s infrastructure intelligently manages availability and performance such that when it’s necessary new instances of an application are launched to ensure meeting the customer’s defined performance and availability thresholds. You know, on-demand scalability that requires no manual intervention. It just “happens” the way it should.... posted @ Friday, October 16, 2009 3:15 AM | Feedback (8)

You’re Asking the Wrong Question About Virtual Appliances A question I often hear is “Why don’t you just move load balancing/application delivery into a virtual appliance model?” My answer is almost always “That’s the wrong question.” The question that should be asked is “What are the potential impacts to the infrastructure and application?” Because the whole point of deploying an application delivery solution – virtual appliance or hardware – is about improving some facet of the infrastructure in order to better deliver your applications. So in order to determine whether using a virtual appliance is a good idea or not you have to ask what the impacts might... posted @ Tuesday, October 06, 2009 3:43 AM | Feedback (9)

Infrastructure 2.0 Isn’t Just For Cloud Computing Operational efficiency in the cloud comes in part from automation and orchestration as well as from the outsourcing of management and maintenance of the hardware. While you can’t achieve the latter without cloud or hosting externally, you can realize a lot of the same efficiencies in a traditional architecture just by leveraging existing collaborative capabilities of infrastructure 2.0. Glenn Gruber of Software Industry Insights in “Who’ll Be the First to Offer Cash for Infrastructure” (which is a great read in general) says:  And for those who are thinking about evaluating a private cloud... posted @ Tuesday, September 29, 2009 4:12 AM | Feedback (2)

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Makes Internal Cloud bursting Reality How to leverage a “private virtual cloud” such as Amazon VPC with your own dynamic infrastructure A couple of blog posts on Amazon’s recent announcement of its VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) have made much of the fact that the resources available within Amazon’s cloud via VPC aren’t public. These same commentaries seem to believe that this makes the resources not very valuable. One author called it a “terrible” implementation because “users can’t expose clients to the internet and can’t assign them IP addresses.” I understand how some might reach that conclusion if they... posted @ Monday, August 31, 2009 3:48 AM | Feedback (1)

The Myth of 100% IT Efficiency Idle resources will always need to exist, especially in a cloud architecture With IT focused on efficiency – for reduction in operating expenses and in the interests of creating a greener computing center – there’s a danger that we’ll attempt to achieve 100% efficiency. You know, the data center in which no compute resources are wasted; all are applied toward performing some task – whether administrative, revenue generating, development cycles, or business-related – and no machine is allowed to sit around idle. Because, after all, idleness is the devil’s playground, isn’t it?  But before... posted @ Wednesday, August 19, 2009 3:17 AM | Feedback (3)

Putting the Cloud Before the Horse Without processes the cloud is not a cloud   So you’ve virtualized your application infrastructure using VMware or Microsoft or the “virtualization solution de jour.” You probably also virtualized the application access via an application delivery solution so you can provide scalability on-demand. You might have even virtualized your storage to make it more efficient. Basically, you’re all ready to go and operators are standing by … And therein lies the problem: operators are standing by. The on-demand piece of your little private cloud is almost entirely managed by human beings, which means... posted @ Friday, August 14, 2009 3:17 AM | Feedback (3)

Dear Developer: Step Away from the Keyboard When it comes to availability, coding a solution is just delaying the inevitable Jonathan Howell, in Five Things That Will Kill Your Site – an excellent read, by the way, for all web application developers – asserts that there are several ways to avoid web application death that do not require the implementation of “expensive redundant hardware with top of the line load balancers and an enterprise class SAN.” In general he’s got some good advice to which application developers should pay attention, but I had to disagree with his assertion that a solution to provide graceful degradation... posted @ Tuesday, August 11, 2009 3:56 AM | Feedback (0)

Scalability Only One Half the Reliability Equation Without availability scalability is irrelevant I really enjoyed Jeff Atwood’s recent blog on Scaling Up vs Scaling Out, which includes a fairly detailed comparison of the costs associated with each approach to scalability. I enjoyed it because not only did it take into consideration the cost of hardware, but also remembered to include the cost of software licensing. And of course there’s the fact that Jeff’s site is focused on development and coding, and this discussion  broadened the discussion into the realm of application networking – a demesne with which I am of course particularly fond. ... posted @ Friday, July 10, 2009 3:38 AM | Feedback (0)

The network ain’t big enough for the both of us There is a tendency to describe every device on a network as simply “the network” regardless of whether that device is dedicated to security, or application delivery (layer 4-7), or actual network (layer 2-3) functionality. It’s an artifact of aging data center architecture models that there exists an artificial line of demarcation between web and application servers and everything else. We used to depict “everything else” as a cloud, but with the emergence of The Cloud doing so simply complicates discussions even further because the “network” necessary to support a dynamic, on-demand operational model of computing like “cloud” is more... posted @ Friday, May 29, 2009 3:49 AM | Feedback (9)

WAN Optimization is not Application Acceleration Increasingly WAN optimization solutions are adopting the application acceleration moniker, implying a focus that just does not exist. WAN optimization solutions are designed to improve the performance of the network, not applications, and while the former does beget improvements of the latter, true application acceleration solutions offer greater opportunity for improving efficiency and end-user experience as well as aiding in consolidation efforts that result in a reduction in operating and capital expenditure costs. WAN Optimization solutions are, as their title implies, focused on the WAN; on the network. It is their task to improve the utilization of bandwidth,... posted @ Wednesday, March 04, 2009 3:29 AM | Feedback (0)

How Obama's Blueprint For Change Impacts IT While doing some research on a related topic I dug into the technical aspects of Obama's Blueprint For Change. The plans around technology are fairly nebulous, with a few exceptions, such as those related specifically to broadband access: Deploy Next-Generation Broadband: Barack Obama believes we can get broadband to every community in America through a combination of reform of the Universal Service Fund, better use of the nation’s wireless spectrum, promotion of next-generation facilities, technologies and applications, and new tax and loan incentives. On this front, a U.S. House committee recommended yesterday... posted @ Friday, January 16, 2009 4:08 AM | Feedback (0)

Building an elastic environment requires elastic infrastructure One of the reasons behind some folks pushing for infrastructure as virtual appliances is the on-demand nature of a virtualized environment. When network and application delivery infrastructure hits capacity in terms of throughput - regardless of the layer of the application stack at which it happens - it's frustrating to think you might need to upgrade the hardware rather than just add more compute power via a virtual image. The truth is that this makes sense. The infrastructure supporting a virtualized environment should be elastic. It should be able to dynamically expand without requiring a new network architecture,... posted @ Tuesday, January 13, 2009 4:15 AM | Feedback (10)

9 ways to use network-side scripting to architect faster, scalable, more secure applications You may recall a recent overview on network-side scripting that described a few uses of this technology integrated with application delivery controllers. With thousands of examples of the uses of network-side scripting it's hard to choose just one to adequately represent its potential. Luckily, we don't have to stick to just one. Viva la Internet! Based on the technical session the great network-side scripting guru Colin and I ran at SD Best Practices in October, I've pulled nine ways to use network-side scripting that can enhance the scalability, security, and performance of web applications into a presentation for... posted @ Thursday, December 11, 2008 4:04 AM | Feedback (4)

Managing Virtual Infrastructure Requires an Application Centric Approach Thanks to a tweet from @Archimedius, I found an insightful blog post from cloud computing provider startup Kaavo that essentially makes the case for a move to application-centric management rather than the traditional infrastructure-centric systems on which we've always relied. We need to have an application centric approach for deploying, managing, and monitoring applications.  A software which can provisions optimal virtual servers, network, storage (storage, CPU, bandwidth, Memory, alt.) resources on-demand and provide automation and ease of use to application owners to easily and securely run and maintain their applications will be critical for the... posted @ Monday, December 01, 2008 2:59 AM | Feedback (4)

Cloud Computing: Vertical Scalability is Still Your Problem Horizontal scalability achieved through the implementation of a load balancing solution is easy. It's vertical scalability that's always been and remains difficult to achieve, and it's even more important in a cloud computing or virtualized environment because now it can hurt you where it counts: the bottom line. Horizontal scalability is the ability of an application to be scaled up to meet demand through replication and the distribution of requests across a pool or farm of servers. It's the traditional load balanced model, and it's an integral component of cloud computing environments. Vertical scalability is the ability of... posted @ Tuesday, November 25, 2008 3:29 AM | Feedback (5)

Why you should not use clustering to scale an application It is often the case that application server clustering and load-balancing are mistakenly believed to be the same thing. They are not. While server clustering does provide rudimentary load-balancing functionality, it does a better job of providing basic fail-over and availability assurance than it does load-balancing. In fact, load balancing has effectively been overtaken by application delivery, which builds on load balancing but is much, much more than that today. Clustering essentially turns one instance of an application server into a controlling node, a proxy of sorts, through which requests are funneled and then distributed amongst several... posted @ Tuesday, November 11, 2008 7:05 AM | Feedback (0)

Cloud Computing: It's the destination, not the journey that is important How the cloud acts and is used is more important than where it physically resides Cloud computing and SOA suffer from the same lack of prescriptive architectures. They are defined by how they act rather than what they are, or from what they are composed. They are, in a way, existential technology that cannot be confined to a simple architectural diagram but require instead a set of properties or ways of acting in order to be recognized. To over simplify and paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre's concepts of existentialism, we define ourselves (mankind) through our actions. To apply this to... posted @ Monday, November 03, 2008 3:29 AM | Feedback (0)

Hope to see you at SD Best Practices I'm off Monday to Boston for SD Best Practices. This is the first time I (and F5) have been at the show, and we're all excited about the opportunity to meet some new folks. Monday is a busy day, with travel and our keynote, "The Best Kept Secret in Building Scalable Applications." Wednesday, fellow blogger Colin and I will be running a technical session on the "9 Things You Can Do to Build Scalable Applications (and 3 You Can't)" that promises to be a lot of fun. In between our speaking engagements, we'll be hanging out... posted @ Friday, October 24, 2008 8:26 AM | Feedback (0)

2.5 bad ways to implement a server load balancing architecture I'm in a bit of mood after reading a Javaworld article on server load balancing that presents some fairly poor ideas on architectural implementations. It's not the concepts that are necessarily wrong; they will work. It's the architectures offered as a method of load balancing made me do a double-take and say "What?"  I started reading this article because it was part 2 of a series on load balancing and this installment focused on application layer load balancing. You know, layer 7 load balancing. Something we at F5 just might know a thing or two about. But you... posted @ Friday, October 24, 2008 7:55 AM | Feedback (2)

3 steps to a fast, secure, and reliable application infrastructure You have just been promoted to CTO of Widgets, Inc. (Congratulations, by the way!) In your new role, on which of the following will you focus the most attention (and budget): (a) the network (b) the applications (c) the data Trick... posted @ Thursday, October 23, 2008 4:40 AM | Feedback (0)

Silverlight 2.0 released, support for Eclipse included Silverlight, if you recall, appears to be Microsoft's answer to Adobe's AIR platform. Microsoft released Silverlight 2.0 today, as expected. Part of the big exciting news is that you can now code up Silverlight applications in Eclipse. Yeah, not kidding. I know, you just hit weather.com too and checked to see what the temperature was. But seriously, Microsoft is fully supportive of the Eclipse environment for Silverlight despite its own support with its own free tool, Visual Web Developer Express. I haven't checked out the Eclipse version yet, so I'll be interested to see it and hear how... posted @ Tuesday, October 14, 2008 1:19 PM | Feedback (0)

My application is not the next Twitter so why should I care about high availability? It often seems that load balancing and high availability are associated with only high traffic sites, like Twitter and Google. But load balancing and high availability isn't just for Web 2.0 phenomenons or web monsters; it can be an invaluable tool in your strategy to maintain service level agreements and customer satisfaction no matter how large or small your customer base - and data center - might be. ... posted @ Tuesday, September 23, 2008 4:34 AM | Feedback (3)

4 things you can do in your code now to make it more scalable later No one likes to hear that they need to rewrite or re-architect an application because it doesn't scale. I'm sure no one at Twitter thought that they'd need to be overhauling their architecture because it gained popularity as quickly as it did. Many developers, especially in the enterprise space, don't worry about the kind of scalability that sites like Twitter or LinkedIn need to concern themselves with, but... posted @ Friday, September 19, 2008 5:09 AM | Feedback (2)

The Best Post on Latency You Will Ever Read No, it's not this one. It's not even mine. It's this one on High Scalability written by Todd Hoff. Not only does he explain latency and its sources, but its costs. Then he goes on to offer a plethora of ways to reduce latency. A couple of suggestions he offers are: Use a TCP Offload Engine (TOE). TOE tech offloads the TCP/IP stack from the main CPU and puts it on the network controller. This means network adapters can respond faster which means faster end-to-end communication. Network adapters respond faster because bus... posted @ Monday, August 25, 2008 8:49 AM | Feedback (0)

All your control are belong to us Abhik, in a reply to "Why can't clouds be inside (the data center)?" says that "the whole point (and primary benefit) of cloud computing is that someone else manages the computing resources. That set of resources is drawn as a cloud in a network diagram because you, the developer or the company using cloud resources, neither knows or cares to know the specifics of the computing infrastructure. An in-house cloud would require procurement, management, maintenance and continuous cost even during idle time -- it is just a grid." Is it? Is that the primary reason enterprises might be considering cloud computing?... posted @ Wednesday, August 20, 2008 3:46 AM | Feedback (0)

Server Virtualization versus Server Virtualization No, that's not a typo. That's the reality of virtualization terminology today: a single term means multiple technology implementations. Server virtualization is used to describe at least two (and probably more) types of virtualization. 1. Server virtualization a la load balancing and application delivery 2. Server virtualization a la VMWare and Microsoft Server virtualization as implemented by load balancers/application delivery controllers is a M:1 virtualization scheme. An application delivery controller like BIG-IP can make many servers look like one server, a virtual server. This type of server virtualization is used... posted @ Thursday, August 07, 2008 4:14 AM | Feedback (9)

Apple twitters twitter (v) to allow your services go up and down randomly under heavy load due to inadequate architecture or planning, annoying a lot of the known (online) world In case you've been living under a rock (or been heads down coding for the past week), Apple launched its latest iPhone today to the delight and, it appears, consternation of customers. A colleague relates his experience not just purchasing one of the eagerly awaited phones, but the disaster that was the activation process. Apparently Apple wasn't satisfied with all the good press it gets about how hip and trendy... posted @ Friday, July 11, 2008 2:19 PM | Feedback (2)

4 Things You Need in a Cloud Computing Infrastructure Cloud computing is, at its core, about delivering applications or services in an on-demand environment. Cloud computing providers will need to support hundreds of thousands of users and applications/services and ensure that they are fast, secure, and available. In order to accomplish this goal, they'll need to build a dynamic, intelligent infrastructure with four core properties in mind: transparency, scalability, monitoring/management, and security.  Transparency One of the premises of Cloud Computing is that services are delivered transparently regardless of the physical implementation within the "cloud". Transparency is one of the foundational concepts of cloud computing, in that the actual implementation of... posted @ Thursday, July 10, 2008 5:45 AM | Feedback (4)

Web 2.0: Integration, APIs, and Scalability Web 2.0 is built on primarily two technologies: AJAX and RSS. AJAX is used to develop interactive, real-time applications while RSS is primarily used as for integration and syndication. Import a feed, share a feed, drag-n-drop a gadget, widget, or component. It's all RSS (XML) today. It's further becoming a requirement of Web 2.0 sites that they provide some sort of API through which developers can write add-on applications. Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook. They all offer APIs that are quite heavily used at this time and startups are following suit. Other sites offer richer media, like video or slideware,... posted @ Tuesday, July 01, 2008 4:53 AM | Feedback (1)

The Role of the Application Delivery Controller in Multi-Tenant Applications Multi-tenant applications are extremely popular in the SaaS (Software as a Service) world. Almost all SaaS delivered CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) and SFA (Sales Force Automation) applications are necessarily multi-tenant. These applications use a meta-data driven model to enable the customization of applications on a per customer basis. This allows the provider to deploy a single application to scale vertically, supporting a wide variety of industries with a single code base. In order to scale horizontally, however, it is necessary to deploy multiple instances of that single code base. To enable a scalable architecture to properly support (hopefully)... posted @ Tuesday, June 24, 2008 5:35 AM | Feedback (0)

6 Reasons You Need an Application Delivery Controller Now Application delivery controllers, and load balancing in general, are often seen as solutions waiting for a problem to solve. We know what those problems are, but until we experience them we often don't feel a sense of urgency in acquiring and deploying an application delivery controller. While it's certainly true that an application delivery controller can solve many problems that arise, it's also true that there are benefits to acquiring and deploying an application delivery controller before it becomes absolutely necessary in order to save your application, your site, or your job. So here are six... posted @ Wednesday, June 18, 2008 7:59 AM | Feedback (0)

Web 2.0 Expo: Presentation Now Available I had several requests for access to my presentation at Web 2.0 Expo. Today, the fine folks at O'Reilly indicated that the presentation is now available for download. Enjoy! Imbibing: Mountain Dew Technorati tags: MacVittie, F5, presentation, Web 2.0 Expo, application delivery, scalability, Web 2.0 posted @ Tuesday, April 29, 2008 8:36 AM | Feedback (0)

Web 2.0 Expo: HTTP is not scalable? The second session I attended today was hosted by Blaine Cook (formerly of Twitter) and discussed the problems inherent in building the real-time web. His reason for dismissing HTTP as a method for building the real-time web: hard to scale for frequent updates and frequent polling. I call shenanigans. HTTP is not hard to scale in those situations if you have the right infrastructure. In fact, just about every application delivery controller in existence can easily scale HTTP - even under circumstances described by Blaine. The frequency of updating and polling is similarily a problem with any real-time web application,... posted @ Wednesday, April 23, 2008 3:28 PM | Feedback (2)

When Your Site Gets Slashdotted, Don't Get Farked Anxiety's attacking me, and my air is getting thin.I'm in trouble for the things I havent got to yet.I'm chomping at the bit, and my palms are getting wet, sweating bullets. --Megadeth, "Sweating Bullets" If you can relate to the kind of stress and anxiety sung about by Megadeth - and it's coming from the workplace - you aren't alone. Last fall InformationWeek ran a short story based on a survey they conducted and concluded that "two out of three IT managers say they're kept awake at night worrying about work, and 75% admit ongoing anxiety about application performance concerns."... posted @ Wednesday, April 16, 2008 6:19 AM | Feedback (0)

Client-side vs Server-side Load Balancing Lei Zhu @ Digital Web Magazine has an interesting article on Client Side Load Balancing for Web 2.0 Applications. It is interesting in that it presents an alternative mechanism for implementing high-availability without the use of an intermediate load balancing solution. His solution relies solely on the client and takes advantage of the dynamic nature of Web 2.0. The problem with Lei's article is that there are a few assumptions made that are simply inaccurate. Lei contends that the negatives to using an intermediate load balancing solution are: There is a limit to the number of... posted @ Monday, October 08, 2007 8:28 AM | Feedback (1)