Tag: Java

Listening to Werner Vogel (Amazon) and Dan Pritchett (EBay) talk about their architecture and design for scalability at QCon was a real eye-opener. I doubt I will need any level of scalability close to theirs in the systems I usually work on, but it is an interesting topic. One of my main concerns when developing applications is that not a lot of developers really can relate to transactions. Many are just used to making one call to the database with lots of SQL, not even grouping several of them into one transaction. Understanding transactions and having them makes life in J2EE land a lot easier, but they are also the main obstacle when it comes to scalability. I am not sure where the line is drawn for when it becomes impossible, but I guess you are talking a fair bit of nodes. If you end up in that situation managebility has an article on Design Patterns for Infinite Scalability. Again, a lot of interesting stuff, check it out.

I wanted to write a couple more blogs from QCon as I walked away with a lot of interesting thoughts, but I’ve been totally swamped with both work and personal stuff since I got back. I’ll still write a couple of them, but in the meantime InfoQ has a good summary here.

Yesterday was pretty much about architecture. Werner Vogel from Amazon did a good talk about how they handle development and scaling. Dan Pritchett from eBay also did a good talk on how they do management and monitoring of their +5000 nodes. One interesting thing he mentioned was that their major problem and the reason they couldn’t increase the number of nodes was access to power. The surrounding power infrastructure can’t handle that much power in one place.

Overall yesterday was really good, and a lot of important input. The Exchange bar with beer and pizza in the evening was good too. What I really like with this conference is that they have speakers with real life experience from large companies that you rarely get to listen to. I probably have missed some of them, but I don’t think many of the good ones from yesterday do blogs, so it’s new info. Blogs I can read when I get back home. 🙂

I watched Eric Schmidts presentation on Democratizing The Cloud at QCon this morning. I was a bit distracted being a bit sick and all, but it was a really good talk.

He focused on how you have to make decisions in your application before you actually would like to make them. When developing a system and implementing the business rules you should not have to think about which client is beeing used (web/thick etc.). You also shouldn’t have to think about concurrency or the back button if you’re doing web.

They’re building stuff like this into LINQ 2.0, and it would really simplify development. That is if it works really good. A lot of people (me included) that I talked to were a bit skeptical about how this will really work and scale. It was however a really tempting thought to not have to think about concurrency or client technology before you deploy and configure the system.