Webscale Tips

A collection of some of my learnings from a decade of building and hosting websites and web applications for one of Africa's largest digital agencies. It will cover areas such as languages, persistence, infrastructure architecture and scaling your team.

Transcript

1. think. create. engage. optimise. Webscaling Tips Craig Raw, CTO Quirk
2. think. create. engage. optimise. What is webscale?
3. think. create. engage. optimise.
4. think. create. engage. optimise. • Users / Accounts • Throughput • Servers • Team • Features
5. think. create. engage. optimise. • Highly available • Transparent • High performance • Scalable • Accessible • Secure • Usable • Inexpensive
6. think. create. engage. optimise. My tips
7. think. create. engage. optimise. Tip #1 Sometimes, programming language is important
8. think. create. engage. optimise. Safe • Java • C# Trial • Ruby • Groovy Caution • PHP • Perl
9. think. create. engage. optimise. Tip #2 Evaluate your persistence
10. think. create. engage. optimise. • SQL queries • Sharding • NoSQL • Database clustering • Caching • Automated schema migration
11. think. create. engage. optimise. Tip #3 Scale out, not up
12. think. create. engage. optimise. • Consider the full roundtrip • Clustering or stickiness for sessions • Automated schema deployment • Load balancing through the stack • Prepare for failures
13. think. create. engage. optimise. Tip #4 Use the cloud (wisely)
14. think. create. engage. optimise. • Often not cheaper • Beware I/O performance • Beware many golden images • Consider Infrastructure-as-Code tools • Evaluate security • What about creating your own cloud?
15. think. create. engage. optimise. Tip #5 Scaling your team
16. think. create. engage. optimise. • DevOps • Agile • Getting everyone in the same room • Hiring giants • Unit and Functional Tests
17. think. create. engage. optimise. Questions? Twitter: @craigraw Email: craig@quirk.biz