-
The wonders of fb:ref and iRules: Serving pages from Facebook’s cache
I wanted to introduce or remind everyone of the fb:ref markup tag and how through the use of iRules in our BIG-IPs we can offload the serving of common pages to facebook’s cache. Importantly this can happen without having to hit or rewrite your application, and is implemented in really fast, robust, edge “application switches”.…
-
Jason’s interviewed in ACM Queue
I’m in the January/February 2008 edition of ACM queue. It’s a conversation between Bryan Cantrill and myself about a number of things including virtualization, Facebook applications, Ruby on Rails and what data store backends should look like by the time we hit the year 2037. The PDF of the print copy is here. Thank you…
-
Fermions, Bosons and the 6 Utilities
When I used to teach university chemistry, I’d always start with the statement: The universe (at one level) is made of two things and two things only: fermions and bosons. Fermions are the things that have “stuff”: they have mass and can be charged (or not). Bosons are the things that have no “stuff”: they…
-
Billions Served: Joyent Accelerators a Real Platform for Growth
Mark Mayo of Joyent gave a presentation yesterday evening at a Facebook developer garage in Vancouver, Canada. One statistic from his presentation really stands out. Joyent provides on-demand infrastructure for one application serving nearly one billion page views per month. One billion. Moreover, the infrastructure cost for that application is just over $10K per month.…
-
NetApp versus Sun, Sun versus NetApp, and Both versus Common Sense
As you might have heard and likely read in the back-and-forth blogging of Dave Hitz (a NetApp founder) and Jonathan Schwartz (CEO of Sun Microsystems), the two are at each other’s throats. Well not really at each other’s throats: NetApp went nuclear and Sun hit back even harder. Basically NetApp says that Sun’s ZFS steals…
-
Joyent DTrace Probes for Ruby in Apple’s Leopard
We are looking forward to installing Leopard on our Macintoshes here at Joyent this weekend. We talked in the recent episode of ps pipe grep about the effort at Sun to ensure Solaris is a good operating system for laptop computers. (Cricket sounds). But seriously, now that OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is shipping (today), with…
-
Using DTrace on MySQL
Even though there aren’t DTrace probes for MySQL released yet, we can still get useful information from MySQL. DTrace has a pid provider which allows us to get into any function the program is executing and see it’s arguments. The only drawback is you have to go digging around in the source code to find…
-
Virtualization is more than just consolidation
I was asked to co-present with an engineer from Sun at an upcoming conference in October. I asked him to do his slides and then shoot me over the presentation so I could fill in my half. I noticed that his view of virtualization and mine were very different. To put it into jargon speak,…
-
When you’re really pushing traffic, Amazon S3 is more expensive than a CDN
I had largely ignored the Amazon S3 pricing hike or decrease (depending on who you are) which included the addition of a per request charge. It really popped up again when I was recently talking to a new accelerator (just a few) + CDN customer recently. They have about 9 million images taking up ~200 GB of space (average…
-
“Is language X scalable? I heard that it isn’t”
A nonsensical question that is rarely qualified. To quote Theo from his fine book Languages aren’t slow; implementations of languages are. and Language selection and scalability have little to do with each other; architectural design and implementation strategy dictate how scalable a final product will be. I couldn’t have put it better myself. The point…
-
Follow
Following
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
Jason A. Hoffman 