Mastering The Cloud

Jeff Rothschild, Vice President of Technology at Facebook, recently gave a presentation entitled “High Performance at Massive Scale – Lessons learned at Facebook” to the University of California, San Diego. Jeff did a great job summarizing the challenges Facebook had to overcome. The following items I found of most importance:

• They are moving towards a PHP compiler that creates machine code and plan on gaining a 40% performance gain once it is complete.
• Even though MySQL is used exclusively for database storage, not a single JOIN is performed. Instead they do manipulations in the web/service tier and feed the cache.
• They average 250,000 cache requests per server

I was a little disappointed that Jeff did not talk about managing deployments and application releases, which is always tricky at large scale.

Direct Link To Video: http://video-jsoe.ucsd.edu/asx/JeffRothschildFacebook.asx

At the end of last month, I gave a presentation at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) to the Computer Science Community (CSC) on behalf Thomson Reuters. I decided to focus it on technologies and best practices that the students will most likely not experience until working full time in a corporate environment. Therefore the presentation was broken down into three main parts:

• Thomson Reuters and Westlaw overview
• Enterprise Development
• Grails

I also made many references to “Cloud Friendly” design of software, which I think is extremely important regardless of whether you intend to run your application in the cloud or not. I will go into this in more detail on a future post. The audience was receptive and I was happy to see many questions answered and positive remarks.