Aehso’s Output

Web Sites and Databases, scaling to meet demand.

With the ever growing trend towards online applications and services, software architects need to be more aware than ever of the challenges in building platforms to host these types of applications. Successful sites in this space (Craigslist, Fickr, Salesforce etc.) all have one common problem to cope with - how do you maintain availability while dealing with exponential audience growth?

Two excellent pieces serve to proffer incredible insight into the experiences of those who have hyper-succeeded in the past:

• Inside MySpace.com, by Baseline Magazine is a great read about how MySpace scaled their architecture from zero to over 26 million user accounts, serving over 40 billion pages a month (isn’t that figure just incredible!).
• Database War Stories is a series of posts by Tim O’Reilly, interviewing folks from Second Life, Memeorandum, Craigslist and more. (The rest of the posts are linked to at the bottom of the first post.)

One common theme in many of these stories: periodically these guys are faced with the stark reality that incremental improvements to existing infrastructure will not sustain the current business model. It is testimony to the folks in charge that they trust their geeks enough to bet the company repeatedly on new architectures.

It is a high-risk world and there are many that fall by the wayside but the rewards for the brave are there for all to see.

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