Thursday, June 24, 2010

Varnish, Voldemort, Virtualization and other vaguely related stuff

A few interesting articles I read these past 2 weeks:

1) Voldemort presentation at QCon - Project Voldemort at Gilt Groupe. I didn't know that Voldemort was storage independent. Interesting to see the different storage options they tested. Lots of other useful presentations from QCon London 2010.

2) Some fairly detailed and low level notes on systems stuff like swapping and paging from the guys who wrote Varnish page cache - You're Doing It Wrong. The original Varnish Architect notes describes the remaining details.

3) The latency and throughput numbers of Market data - http://www.latencystats.com/ and http://www.marketdatapeaks.com/

4) Azul Systems opens up a part of their awesome runtime - http://www.managedruntime.org/. They have a Linux kernel module for better memory management. I'll follow this with interest, being a fan of the awesome Dr. Cliff Click.

5) Some questions I had posted on Virtualization expert blogs about when not to use them. There's no doubt that Sys Admins and IT guys want everything in the data centers to move to a 100% virtualized environment. Apparently it not just about server consolidation anymore. Companies are willing to sacrifice some performance for easier provisioning. To me the performance reduction is disappointing. It's like 2001 all over again when Java was slow and there was a lot of resistance to using it in production. Eventually the JVMs became faster (well, so did the processors to some extent) and people stopped thinking twice about using Java. Now, just when you thought Java was going to run blazing fast on multi-core, there's a second VM under the Java VM to slow things down. Dang! So much for progress. Now we have to wait for 10G pipes , SSDs and mega-multi-core to make up for the drop in power.

6) ORM - do we still have that impedance mismatch? Why are there so many standards - JDO and JPA and so many frameworks? Apache itself has so many. Then there is Hibernate, DataNucleus and EclipseLink.

7) Does Queuing interest you? ZeroMQ looks interesting. Anything that is open source interests me. Here's some eval notes on open source queuing systems. A little dated but still interesting.

Until next time!