Building An Infinitely Scaleable Online Recording Campaign For David Guetta

This is a guest repost of an interview posted by Ryan S. Brown that originally appeared on serverlesscode.com. It continues our exploration of building systems on top of Lambda.

Paging David Guetta fans: this week we have an interview with the team that built the site behind his latest ad campaign. On the site, fans can record themselves singing along to his single, “This One’s For You” and build an album cover to go with it.

Under the hood, the site is built on Lambda, API Gateway, and CloudFront. Social campaigns tend to be pretty spiky – when there’s a lot of press a stampede of users can bring infrastructure to a crawl if you’re not ready for it. The team at parall.ax chose Lambda because there are no long-lived servers, and they could offload all the work of scaling their app up and down with demand to Amazon.

James Hall from parall.ax is going to tell us how they built an internationalized app that can handle any level of demand from nothing in just six weeks.

The Interview

Sponsored Post: Netflix, Macmillan, Aerospike, TrueSight Pulse, LaunchDarkly, Robinhood, StatusPage.io, Redis Labs, InMemory.Net, VividCortex, MemSQL, Scalyr, AiScaler, AppDynamics, ManageEngine, Site24x7

Who's Hiring?

• Manager - Site Reliability Engineering: Lead and grow the the front door SRE team in charge of keeping Netflix up and running. You are an expert of operational best practices and can work with stakeholders to positively move the needle on availability. Find details on the position here: https://jobs.netflix.com/jobs/398


• Macmillan Learning, a premier e-learning institute, is looking for VP of DevOps to manage the DevOps teams based in New York and Austin. This is a very exciting team as the company is committed to fully transitioning to the Cloud, using a DevOps approach, with focus on CI/CD, and using technologies like Chef/Puppet/Docker, etc. Please apply here.


• DevOps Engineer at Robinhood. We are looking for an Operations Engineer to take responsibility for our development and production environments deployed across multiple AWS regions. Top candidates will have several years experience as a Systems Administrator, Ops Engineer, or SRE at a massive scale. Please apply here.


• Senior Service Reliability Engineer (SRE): Drive improvements to help reduce both time-to-detect and time-to-resolve while concurrently improving availability through service team engagement.  Ability to analyze and triage production issues on a web-scale system a plus. Find details on the position here: https://jobs. Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For January 15th, 2016

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

Space walk from 2001: A Space Odyssey? Nope. A base jump from the CN Tower in Toronto.

• 13.5TB: open data from Yahoo for machine learning; 1+ exabytes: data stored in the cloud; 13: reasons autonomous cars should have steering wheels; 3,000: kilowatt-hours of energy generated by the solar bike path; 10TB: helium-filled hard disk; $224 Billion: 2016 gadget spending in US; 85: free ebooks; 17%: Azure price drop on some VMs; 20.5: tons of explosives detonated on Mythbusters; 20 Billion: Apple’s App Store Sales; 70%: Global Internet traffic goes through Northern Virginia; 12: photos showing the beauty of symmetry; 


• Quotable Quote:
  • @WhatTheFFacts: Scaling Earth's 'life' to 46 years, the industrial revolution began 1 minute ago -- In that time we've destroyed half the world's forests.
  • David Brin: The apotheosis of Darth Vader was truly disgusting. Saving one demigod—a good demigod, his son—wiped away all his guilt from slaughtering billions of normal people.
  • Brian Brazil: In today’s world, having a 1:1 coupling between machines and services is becoming less Continue reading

A Beginner’s Guide to Scaling to 11 Million+ Users on Amazon’s AWS

How do you scale a system from one user to more than 11 million users? Joel Williams, Amazon Web Services Solutions Architect, gives an excellent talk on just that subject: AWS re:Invent 2015 Scaling Up to Your First 10 Million Users.

If you are an advanced AWS user this talk is not for you, but it’s a great way to get started if you are new to AWS, new to the cloud, or if you haven’t kept up with with constant stream of new features Amazon keeps pumping out.

As you might expect since this is a talk by Amazon that Amazon services are always front and center as the solution to any problem. Their platform play is impressive and instructive. It's obvious by how the pieces all fit together Amazon has done a great job of mapping out what users need and then making sure they have a product in that space. 

Some of the interesting takeaways:

• Start with SQL and only move to NoSQL when necessary.
• A consistent theme is take components and separate them out. This allows those components to scale and fail independently. It applies to breaking up tiers and creating microservices.
• Only invest in tasks Continue reading

Uptime Funk – Best Sysadmin Parody Video Ever!

I'm all green (hot patch)
Called a Penguin and Chameleon
I'm all green (hot patch)
Call Torvalds and Kroah-Hartman
It’s too hot (hot patch)
Yo, say my name you know who I am
It’s too hot (hot patch)
I ain't no simple code monkey
Nuthin's down

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For January 8th, 2016

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

Finally, a clear diagram of Amazon's industry impact. (MARK A. GARLICK)

• 150: # of globular clusters in the Milky Way; 800 million: Facebook Messenger users; 180,000: high-res images of the past; 1 exaflops: 1 million trillion floating-point operations per second; 10%: of Google's traffic is now IPv6; 100 milliseconds: time it takes to remember; 35: percent of all US Internet traffic used by Netflix; 125 million: hours of content delivered each day by Netflix's CDN;


• Quotable Quotes:
  • Erik DeBenedictis: We could build an exascale computer today, but we might need a nuclear reactor to power it
  • wstrange: What I really wish the cloud providers would do is reduce network egress costs. They seem insanely expensive when compared to dedicated servers.
  • rachellaw: What's fascinating is the bot-bandwagon is mirroring the early app market.
    With apps, you downloaded things to do things. With bots, you integrate them into things, so they'll do it for you. 
  • erichocean: The situation we're in today with RAM is pretty much the identical situation with the disks of Continue reading

Let’s Donate Our Organs and Unused Cloud Cycles to Science

There’s a long history of donating spare compute cycles for worthy causes. Most of those efforts were started in the Desktop Age. Now, in the Cloud Age, how can we donate spare compute capacity? How about through a private spot market?

There are cycles to spare. Public Cloud Usage trends:

• Instances are underutilized with average utilization rates between 8-9%

• 24% of instance reservations are unused

Maybe all that CapEx sunk into Reserved Instances can be put to some use? Maybe over provisioned instances could be added to the resource pool as well? That’s a lot of power Captain. How could it be put to good use?

There is a need to crunch data. For science. Here’s a great example as described in This is how you count all the trees on Earth. The idea is simple: from satellite pictures count the number of trees. It’s an embarrassingly parallel problem, perfect for the cloud. NASA had a problem. Their cloud is embarrassingly tiny. 400 hypervisors shared amongst many projects. Analysing all the data would would take 10 months. An unthinkable amount of time in this Real-time Age. So they used the spot market on AWS.

The upshot? The test run cost Continue reading

Sponsored Post: Netflix, StatusPage.io, Redis Labs, Jut.io, SignalFx, InMemory.Net, VividCortex, MemSQL, Scalyr, AiScaler, AppDynamics, ManageEngine, Site24x7

Who's Hiring?

• Manager - Site Reliability Engineering: Lead and grow the the front door SRE team in charge of keeping Netflix up and running. You are an expert of operational best practices and can work with stakeholders to positively move the needle on availability. Find details on the position here: https://jobs.netflix.com/jobs/398


• Senior Service Reliability Engineer (SRE): Drive improvements to help reduce both time-to-detect and time-to-resolve while concurrently improving availability through service team engagement.  Ability to analyze and triage production issues on a web-scale system a plus. Find details on the position here: https://jobs.netflix.com/jobs/434


• Manager - Performance Engineering: Lead the world-class performance team in charge of both optimizing the Netflix cloud stack and developing the performance observability capabilities which 3rd party vendors fail to provide.  Expert on both systems and web-scale application stack performance optimization. Find details on the position here https://jobs.netflix.com/jobs/860482


• Senior Devops Engineer - StatusPage.io is looking for a senior devops engineer to help us in making the internet more transparent around downtime. Your mission: help us create a fast, scalable infrastructure that can be deployed to quickly and reliably.


• UI Engineer– AppDynamics, founded in 2008 and lead Continue reading

Server-Side Architecture. Front-End Servers and Client-Side Random Load Balancing

Chapter by chapter Sergey Ignatchenko is putting together a wonderful book on the Development and Deployment of Massively Multiplayer Games, though it has much broader applicability than games. Here's a recent chapter from his book.

Enter Front-End Servers

Our Classical Deployment Architecture (especially if you do use FSMs) is not bad, and it will work, but there is still quite a bit of room for improvement for most of the games out there. More specifically, we can add another row of servers in front of the Game Servers, as shown on Fig VI.8:

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For January 1st, 2016

Hey, Happy New Year, it's HighScalability time:

River system? Vascular system? Nope. It's a map showing how all roads really lead to Rome.

• 71: mentions of innovation by the Chinese Communist Party; 60.5%: of all burglaries involve forcible entry; 280,000-squarefoot: Amazon's fulfillment center in India capable of shipping 2 million items; 11 billion: habitable earth like planets in the goldilocks zone in just our galaxy; 800: people working on the iPhone's camera (how about the app store?); 3.3 million: who knew there were so many Hello Kitty fans?; 26 petabytes: size of League of Legends' data warehouse; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • George Torwell: Tor is Peace / Prism is Slavery / Internet is Strength
  • @SciencePorn: Mr Claus will eat 150 BILLION calories and visit 5,556 houses per second this Christmas Eve.
  • @SciencePorn: Blue Whale's heart is so big, a small child can swim through the veins.
  • @BenedictEvans: There are close to 4bn people on earth with a phone (depending on your assumptions). Will go to at least 5bn. So these issues will grow.
  • @JoeSondow: "In real life you Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For December 18th, 2015

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

In honor of a certain event what could be better than a double-bladed lightsaber slicing through clouds? (ESA/Hubble & NASA)

• 66,000 yottayears: lifetime of an electron; 3 Gbps: potential throughput for backhaul microwave networks; 1.2 trillion: yearly Google searches; $100 trillion: global investible capital; 2.5cm: range of chip powered by radio waves; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @KarenMN: He's making a database / He's sorting it twice / SELECT * from contacts WHERE behavior = 'nice' / SQL Clause is coming to town
  • abrkn: Every program attempts to expand until it has an app store. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
  • Amin Vahdat: Some recent external measurements indicate that our [Google] backbone carries the equivalent of 10 percent of all the traffic on the global Internet. The rate at which that volume is growing is faster than for the Internet as a whole.
  • Prismatic:  we also learned content distribution is a tough business and we’ve failed to grow at a rate that justifies continuing to support our Prismatic News Continue reading

How Does the Use of Docker Effect Latency?

A great question came up on the mechanical-sympathy list that many others probably have as well: 

I keep hearing about [Docker] as if it is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I've heard anecdotal evidence that low latency apps take a hit. 

Who better to answer than Gil Tene, Vice President of Technology and CTO, Co-Founder, of Azul Systems? Like Stephen Curry draining a deep transition three, Gil can always be counted on for his insight:

• The Black Magic Of Systematically Reducing Linux OS Jitter
• Your Load Generator Is Probably Lying To You - Take The Red Pill And Find Out Why

And here's Gil's answer:

Putting aside questions of taste and style, and focusing on the effects on latency (the original question), the analysis from a pure mechanical point of view is pretty simple: Docker uses Linux containers as a means of execution, with no OS virtualization layer for CPU and memory, and with optional (even if default is on) virtualization layers for i/o. 

CPU and Memory

From a latency point of view, Docker's (and any other Linux container's) CPU and memory latency characteristics are pretty much indistinguishable from Linux itself. But the same things Continue reading

Does AMP Counter an Existential Threat to Google?

When AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) was first announced it was right inline with Google’s long standing project to make the web faster. Nothing seemingly out of the ordinary.

Then I listened to a great interview on This Week in Google with Richard Gingras, Head of News at Google, that made it clear AMP is more than just another forward looking initiative from Google. Much more.

What is AMP? AMP is two things. AMP is a restricted subset of HTML designed to make the web fast on mobile devices. AMP is also a strategy to counter an existential threat to Google: the mobile web is in trouble and if the mobile web is in trouble then Google is in trouble.

In the interview Richard says (approximately):

The alternative [to a strong vibrant community around AMP] is devastating. We don’t want to see a decline in the viability of the mobile web. We don’t want to see poor experiences on the mobile web propel users into proprietary platforms.

This point, or something very like it, is repeated many times during the interview. With ad blocker usage on the rise there’s a palpable sense of urgency to do something. So Google stepped Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For December 11th, 2015

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

Cheesy Star Trek graphics? Nope. It's hot gas streaming into Pandora’s Cluster.

• 100 million: John Henry as played by a conventional computer loses to a quantum computer; 400,000: cores in PayPal's OpenStack deployment; 10TB: max size of Google Cloud SQL database; 9%: Kickstarter projects that don't deliver; $2.3 trillion: worth of The Forbes 400 members; billions: worth of Spanish treasure ship;


• Quotable Quotes:
  • Pandalicious: I actually expect that down the road most large open source projects will start distributing a standardized build environment via docker containers. 
  • @glasnt: "Optimise for speed flexibility & evolution" "Whoever is iterating faster has a huge advantage" - @adrianco #yow15 
  • @erikbryn: LIDAR goes from $75K to $500, leaves Moore's Law in the Dust
  • Henry Miller: One has to believe wholeheartedly in what one is doing, realize that it is the best one can do at the moment—forego perfection now and always!—and accept the consequences which giving birth entails.
  • @jedws: "uber is way more reliable on Saturday and Sunday because there are no engineers working on the.system" #yow15
  • Continue reading

Free Red Book: Readings in Database Systems, 5th Edition

For the first time in ten years there has been an update to the classic Red Book, Readings in Database Systems, which offers "readers an opinionated take on both classic and cutting-edge research in the field of data management."

Editors Peter Bailis, Joseph M. Hellerstein, and Michael Stonebraker curated the papers and wrote pithy introductions. Unfortunately, links to the papers are not included, but a kindly wizard, Nindalf, gathered all the referenced papers together and put them in one place.

What's in it?

Related Articles

• Michael Stonebraker | Big Data is (at least) Four Different Problems
• The Red Book (Jung)

Sponsored Post: StatusPage.io, Redis Labs, Jut.io, SignalFx, InMemory.Net, VividCortex, MemSQL, Scalyr, AiScaler, AppDynamics, ManageEngine, Site24x7

Who's Hiring?

• Senior Devops Engineer - StatusPage.io is looking for a senior devops engineer to help us in making the internet more transparent around downtime. Your mission: help us create a fast, scalable infrastructure that can be deployed to quickly and reliably.


• At Scalyr, we're analyzing multi-gigabyte server logs in a fraction of a second. That requires serious innovation in every part of the technology stack, from frontend to backend. Help us push the envelope on low-latency browser applications, high-speed data processing, and reliable distributed systems. Help extract meaningful data from live servers and present it to users in meaningful ways. At Scalyr, you’ll learn new things, and invent a few of your own. Learn more and apply.


• UI Engineer– AppDynamics, founded in 2008 and lead by proven innovators, is looking for a passionate UI Engineer to design, architect, and develop our their user interface using the latest web and mobile technologies. Make the impossible possible and the hard easy. Apply here.


• Software Engineer - Infrastructure & Big Data – AppDynamics, leader in next generation solutions for managing modern, distributed, and extremely complex applications residing in both the cloud and the data center, is Continue reading

The Serverless Start-up – Down with Servers!

This is a guest post by Marcel Panse and Sander Nagtegaal from Teletext.io.

In our early Peecho days, we wrote an article explaining how to build a really scalable architecture for next to nothing, using Amazon Web Services. Auto-scaling, merciless decoupling and even automated bidding on unused server capacity were the tricks we used back then to operate on a shoestring. Now, it is time to take it one step further.

We would like to introduce Teletext.io, also known as the serverless start-up - again, entirely built around AWS, but leveraging only the Amazon API Gateway, Lambda functions, DynamoDb, S3 and Cloudfront.

The Virtues of Constraint

We like rules. At our previous start-up Peecho, product owners had to do fifty push-ups as payment for each user story that they wanted to add to an ongoing sprint. Now, at our current company myTomorrows, our developer dance-offs are legendary: during the daily stand-ups, you are only allowed to speak while dancing - leading to the most efficient meetings ever.

This way of thinking goes all the way into our product development. It may seem counter-intuitive at first, but constraints fuel creativity. For example, all Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For December 4th, 2015

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

Change: Elliott $800,000 in 1960, 8K RAM, 2kHz CPU vs Raspberry Pi Zero, $5, 1Ghz, 512MB

• 434,000: square-feet in Facebook's new office;  $62.5 billion: Uber's valuation; 11: DigitalOcean datacenters; $4.45 billion: black Friday online sales; 2MPH: speed news traveled in 1500; 95: percent of world covered by mobile broadband; 86%: items Amazon delivers that weigh less than five pounds.


• Quotable Quotes:
  • Jeremy Hsu: Is anybody thinking about how we’ll have to code differently to accommodate the jump from a 1-exaflop supercomputer to 10 exaflops? There is not enough attention being paid to this issue.
  • @kml: “Process drives away talent” - @adrianco at #yow15
  • capkutay: Seems like a lot of the momentum behind containers is driven by the Silicon Valley investment community.
  • @taotetek: IoT is turning homes into datacenters with no system administrators and no security team.
  • @asymco: On Thursday and early Friday, mobile traffic accounted for nearly 60% of all online shopping traffic, and 40% of all online sales
  • Mobile App Developers are Suffering: It’s Continue reading

Deep Lessons from Google and eBay on Building Ecosystems of Microservices

When you look at large scale systems from Google, Twitter, eBay, and Amazon, their architecture has evolved into something similar: a set of polyglot microservices.

What does it looks like when you are in the polyglot microservices end state? Randy Shoup, who worked in high level positions at both Google and eBay, has a very interesting talk exploring just that idea: Service Architectures at Scale: Lessons from Google and eBay.

What I really like about Randy's talk is how he is self-consciously trying to immerse you in the experience of something you probably have no experience of: creating, using, perpetuating, and protecting a large scale architecture.

In the Ecosystem of Services section of the talk Randy asks: What does it look like to have a large scale ecosystem of polyglot microservices? In the Operating Services at Scale section he asks: As a service provider what does it feel like to operate such a service? In the Building a Service section he asks: When you are a service owner what does it look like? And in the Service Anti-Patterns section he asks: What can go wrong?

A very powerful approach.

The highlight of the talk for me was the idea of Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For November 27th, 2015

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

The most detailed picture of the Internet ever as compiled by an illegal 420,000-node botnet.

• $40 billion: P2P lending in China; 20%: amount of all US margin expansion accounted for by Apple since 2010; 11: years of Saturn photos; 117: number of different steering wheels offered for a VW Golf; 1Gbps: speed of a network using a lightbulb.


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @jaksprats: If we could compile a subset of JavaScript to Lua, JS could run on Server(Node,js), Browser, Desktop, iOS, & Android.JS could run EVERYWHERE
  • @wilkieii: Tech: "Don't roll your own crypto if you aren't an expert" *replaces nutrition with Soylent, currency with bitcoin* *puts wifi in lightbulb*
  • @brianpeddle: The architecture of one human brain would require a zettabyte of capacity. Full simulation of a human brain by 2023.
  • MarshalBanana: That can still easily be the right choice. Complex algorithms trade asymptotic performance for setup cost and maintenance cost. Sometimes the tradeoff isn't worth it.
  • kevindeasi: There are so many things to know nowadays. Backend: Sql, NoSql, NewSql, etc. Middlware: Django, NodeJs, Spring, Groovy, RoR, Symfony, etc. Client: Angular, Ember, React, Jquery, etc. I haven't even mentioned hardware, security, Continue reading