Scalability In the Cloud Era Isn't What You Think 75
Esther Schindler writes "'Scalability' isn't a checkbox on a vendor's feature chart — though plenty of them speak of it that way. In this IT Expert Voice article, Scott Fulton examines how we define 'scalability,' why it's data that has to scale more than servers, and how old architectural models don't always apply. He writes, 'If you believe that a scalable architecture for an information system, by definition, gives you more output in proportion to the resources you throw at it, then you may be thinking a cloud-based deployment could give your existing system "infinite scalability." Companies that are trying out that theory for the first time are discovering not just that the theory is flawed, but that their systems are flawed and now they're calling out for help.'"
I read the article (Score:5, Interesting)
and learned not a damned thing. Classic marketecture speak.
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Given "marketecture" speak is what got us into this cloud mess in the first place, perhaps fighting back with "marketecture" is appropriate.
Re:I read the article (Score:5, Insightful)
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So... you think that Youtube just popped into existence one day, perfectly scalable? People had to design a horizontally scalable video distribution platform. True, it works very well.
But that's irrelevant. Companies are coming online with products and thinking "I'll just host it in The Cloud(tm)!" Then they start looking at "Cloud services". And they think that their application will Just Work(tm) in The Cloud(tm).
Technology people know it doesn't work like this. Products, applications, and architect
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Now we just upload to youtube, and viola, it works.
I don't understand, what does this string instrument [wikipedia.org] have to do with it?
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and learned not a damned thing. Classic marketecture speak.
You must be new here.
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OK, I'll bite.
No, really, get the fuck out of here or I will fucking bite you.
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I don't think it's marketecture -- I think it' trying to point out some issues which most of us have never really thought about in terms of cloud computing.
Admittedly, I couldn't read through the entire article in one go, but I am going to go back and try to finish it.
The thesis seems to be something along the lines of: everyone thinks that with cloud computing if you keep throwing resources at the problem, scalability is something which sorts itse
Re:I read the article (Score:4, Insightful)
Marketecture part: The delusional fantasy that because one is able to talk about things in a new way, old problems affecting scalability no longer apply. Very true. The marketers believe it. The foolish customers believe it. Anyone who has a clue runs for the hills.
Not grokking with fullness part: You've accurately grokked the "every (idiot) thinks that if ..." part. What you haven't grokked is the details. In place of your speculation, just substitute that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
The fantasy I see over and over again whenever a "new" paradigm changing technology comes along is that problems which were hard using the 'old' approach are suddenly eliminated merely by virtue of doing things in a "new" way. The fantasy is that having the 'insight' to recognize the awesome potential of the magical new approach is somehow superior to having the discipline to *fully* understand the problem and solving it decisively and intelligently. The latter is often viewed as not worth the effort or offering a "poor return on investment". The delusion is that effort is better spent on looking for a loophole that doesn't require any understanding because the new approach will magically make the hard problem go away so nobody has to expend any real effort. Doing things 'in the cloud' is one of those magic new approaches that substitutes for actually engineering a solution in an informed way.
Even if a new approach reduces the effort previously required for certain tasks, it invariably brings with it new problems that have to be understood in order to avoid being bogged down.
History shows that folks who solve the hard problem wipe the floor with those who are looking for shortcuts. FedEx (solved the logistics problems associated with rapid delivery to anywhere), Southwest Airlines (solved the logistics problems associated with low cost regional air travel), Walmart (developed a satellite network to track inventory and sales chain-wide). Google (a better algorithm for search). Etc.
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first reply! (Score:1)
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scale!
No. It is
sudo scale
Nice URL (Score:3, Insightful)
It says ad right there so there isn't any question.
Infinite scalability? (Score:3, Interesting)
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I dunno - I remember a Director of Architecture who could produce infinite fluff. From this, one can extrapolate that you could build a machine that did an infinite amount of nothing useful. It would need to be a quantum computer that existed in every possible state simultaneously, much like said Director in fact.
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Sometimes an old thought can trigger a new line of thinking. For example, it would be difficult to make a 3-CCD camera that's as flat as a modern digital camera, because a decent-sized CCD placed sideways will widen the camera by that amount. The prism would normally be bulky, too. Far as I know, that's the main reason you see this sort of camera on high-end video equipment, not cheap digital cameras. However, I don't see anything there that can't be solved by using a few lenses and mirrors. Since CCDs can
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You're right about the optics being the challenging part. It would depend on whether it's cheaper to make errors smaller or lenses/mirrors larger (either will let you reduce the visibility of defects, up to a point), and on how large an angle any defect can be allowed to cover when the image reaches the CCD. To be honest, I haven't the foggiest. And, yes, the very earliest (late 1800s, early 1900s) "colour" photography was done by photographing through three distinct filters and you can therefore do the sam
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Infinite scalability isn't the only snake oil in the cloud. Other cloud computing myths [toolbox.com] include "all you need is a credit card" and "cloud is cheaper."
tl:dr (Score:3, Funny)
Of-course it is a checkbox (Score:5, Interesting)
Scalability is a buzzword that equipment, databases and servers (hardware/software) are sold on. It is as if by adding more weblogic servers to a cluster really makes your application scalable, as if throwing more processors onto a RAID system gives you more parallel ways to read / write the same data etc.
It is all true to an extent and it is all false where it really matters. Applications need to be designed to be scalable and if I learned anything over the past 16 years is that people do not even begin to understand what it means.
The managers and even many 'architects' really think that by throwing some stupid app on a cluster will really solve the scalability issues and so on. But the problem is that it is a very specific problem that can be solved by simply adding cluster nodes without actually properly designing the app. I blame various silver bullets like EJBs, CORBA, RMI, JNDI, BEA, Oracle, IBM and such for promoting this view among the top brass and pulling attention away from working out correct architecture to solve the specific problems that appear in building truly scalable applications.
Application servers and databases are the worst at this, they certainly provide some specific type of scalability solution but because of that, it is almost expected that it does not matter how an app is designed to interact with these, and the design is really on the distant third, fourth, fifth or further place, way behind the deadlines, the politics, the hiring practices etc.
Scalability is like security, it is not a one specific thing it is a way to approach many different issues and problems and even when you think your app is secure in 5 different ways, there is a sixth way in which it is not. Same with scalability: it is not only about multi-threading requests, it is not only about multiple processors for a RAID system, it is about total understanding of how the application is and will be used and adjusting it for various types of usage. Proper design for scalability mixes various approaches, there could be intermediate steps added, back-ground processing added, intermediary storage, separate storage for reading than for saving, various caching mechanisms and synchronization between nodes in a cluster for different caching questions. This could be redefining an algorithm to be less dependent on reading data from slow media. Some things are not supposed to be done in parallel, so certain bottlenecks due to synchronization need to be looked at and solved early on, because these become the Achilles heel - synchronizing on anything at all can defeat a super-fast cluster and make it no better than as a single laptop.
It is a design issue.
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But many types of video processing DO scale very nicely, as racks and racks of SGI machines proved years ago ("rendering farm" is a beautiful name for computers...). The "flow of time" argument against scaling, which is basically an argument against easy parallelization, works for some things but not others.
Even when the analysis or manipulation of one frame depends heavily on those before it, most video (or audio) work is broken nicely into scenes (or tracks/movements) which can be easily scaled - damn nea
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My experience with Oracle Grid Computing tells me you don't quite understand the capabilities of their RDBMS/Grid Platforms.
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My experience with Oracle shills is that they tout Oracle as the only true way. Luckily I am not susceptible to advertising, I look at facts. Fact is that Oracle's grid computing will add no more scalability to any particular application than their earlier clustering approach, though it may help with cutting some costs on probably some hardware and energy, good, that should help to offset the crazy licensing costs. I am setting PostgreSQL everywhere I can, and I use more of an app design approach to solve
I dunno... (Score:5, Funny)
That ash cloud from Eyjafjallajokull seems to be scaling pretty good.
Eyjafjallajokull is the ice cap or glacier (Score:2)
Eyjafjalla is the volcano
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Eyjafjalla is the volcano
Since we're being pedantic, Eyja*fjöll* is the mountain (welcome to Icelandic). That said, the friendly natives as well speak of the cloud coming from the glacier/jökull.
the "Cloud" (Score:1)
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Sharepoint isn't a cloud, it's a CMS with a whole lot of crap mixed in.
Microsoft's cloud service is called Azure. One of my coworkers was looking at it to host his company's web site and services. The scalability there was actually quite impressive for simple hosting and heavy loads. I don't know the details, but he seemed pretty impressed by it, just not by the cost. It was right on par cost wise as having a dedicated VM with decent resources. The only real difference he was looking at going from a dedicat
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If you cloudsource everything, you can lay off all your datacenter operations staff. You still need sysadmins, security guys, and coders; but the people who run wires, rack servers, replace faulty disks, manage the SAN, etc. etc. are no longer relevant. You must factor the cost of this staff when comparing TCO.
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Nothing.
Well, nothing until some Chinese ISP screws up a BGP setting for a netblock they have nothing to do with.
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A cost that isn't visible in the short term. Thus, it's invisible to the poeple making the decisions.
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Until they can get the cost to be lower than the TCO of a cheap server, UPS, and business cable line though, I can't see making the jump for small businesses.
Remember that TCO isn't only hardware (server, UPS, cable). You also have to factor in software licenses, physical building, physical building security, network security, HVAC costs, etc. And these are just the easy to calculate costs.
You also have to think about other costs such as procurement (someone has to order the hardware from Dell, receive it at the shipping dock, unbox it, install the server OS on it, handle warranty repairs, etc), network administration, management overhead, load balancing, etc.
Slight difference in scope (Score:2)
I agree completely. I should have spoken more clearly.
My co-worker's personal small business has 1 employee: him. He is a skilled tech guy who can handle most of the work himself. He had 3 options:
1) Move to the cloud for ~$150/month. supreme uptime, no hassle scaling, everything is managed for him
2) Move to a more robust dedicated virtual machine for ~$150/month. solid up time, scaling available, all network stuff is managed for him
3) Buy a server and business cable line to his residence for ~$750 one time
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This is that same idea that if you take a single threaded app and put it on an 8 core proc, you will not get any performance boost from the single core. If your data set has to join a trillion rows to a billion rows, you can throw all the parallelism you want at it and you will just have a t
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If your data set has to join a trillion rows to a billion rows, you can throw all the parallelism you want at it and you will just have a thousand boxen trying to perform the same join a thousand times and performance will not improve.
No, you split your billion row table into a thousand pieces so each piece fits in memory on one of your thousand machines, and then multicast your trillion row table to all thousand machines and have them match the stream against the million rows they have in memory.
cloud computing only scales horizontally (Score:4, Interesting)
The Google App Engine cloud computing offering plans to (eventually) automatically scale your application as much as you need. But that scalability comes at a cost: only key-value stores may be used. Sorry, no relational databases available. JOINs just don't scale. You can distribute data across any number of nodes, but JOINing data which lives on separate computers is not gonna happen.
If you need JOIN-like behavior, your app has to request all the data, then compute the result itself. Trying to write an app for such a system means rearchitecting the data in ways to minimize the need for such operations, even if that means having duplicate data.
It's quite an exercise to unlearn what you have learned about SQL and relational databases, but the use of object mappers can help a lot.
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I've seen joins scale decently with Teradata. Might not be the best OLTP oriented database, but a great analytical database when you need to do very complex BI Logic searches across large datasets.
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So one is going to have to learn a totally different way to do everything and then deal with a new set of problems. :)
Which is why IBM is still selling ZSystems running DB2
That being said I have not used much in the way of key-value database in a complex application. Frankly it sounds like a real pain.
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J2EE folks should definitely check out JDO as a better way to develop for the cloud [dynamicalsoftware.com]. With JDO, you can stay relational or move to EC2 or GAE without making a big code commitment.
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JOINs just don't scale. You can distribute data across any number of nodes, but JOINing data which lives on separate computers is not gonna happen.
If that's the case, then surely we're Doing Something Really Wrong with our implementation of relational theory. Should we perhaps be looking at things like Extended Set Theory [xprogramming.com] instead?
Relational - (and more specifically, SQL, which as Chris Date is at pains to tell every is NOT even a correct let alone good implementation of the relational model - but even Codd's original paper shows signs of this) - came out of a timesharing environment, where it was just assumed as a matter of course that you'd have very
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If for every additional 10 tasks a system is required to do takes an additional 10 units of computing resources that is not "scalability" regardless of how easy it is to procrue those additional resources.
Or perhaps that is an example of an app that scales linearly, and what people really want when they want scalability is a system that scales geometrically?
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Growing your cluster to handle more traffic is certainly considered "scaling" by most, and this is the way most cloud-computing services do things. I refer to this sort of scaling as horizontal, whereas adding RAM or CPU power to a single machine would be horizontal scaling. Please correct me if you know of a better term...
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I am in the process of migrating my servers to EC2 so I am a big fan of cloud computing. I am intrigued by app engine but it would mean
Sidebar tocloud computing only scales horizontally (Score:3, Interesting)
Order of functions (Score:2)
Hand wave (Score:5, Funny)
"Linda. The malware infecting you CRT is several beta tests behind the best practice of current IPv6 drives. I will need your password to defrag the driver and upload the taskbar to your certification path...Thank you Linda."
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God, only a true nerd would say that. Here, let me show you how this is done.
"Linda. ... I will need you to drink this bottle of Scotch and hop in the hot tub while I defrag the driver and upload the taskbar to your certification path. I will come there when it is done...Thank you Linda."
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Have you seen Linda? I think you'd be better off drinking the bottle of Scotch yourself if you plan on joining her in the hot tub.
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well .. (Score:2)
Well, expecting to get more output from the same input is of course illogical and impossible, but if a company puts up the planning, development and engineering resources to make it happen up front than the scalability claims in the marketing copy can be done to some extent.
But the way some (most?) deployments seem to go make it cost prohibitive to put the distributed database / distributed applications and fault tolerant components in in the first place.
Scalability makes no sense on Hardware.... (Score:2)
By the time you need to expand a complete and less expensive system has already supersceded what iron you were originally running it on.
In many cases it is cheaper to replace the hardware than adding more "modules" for your scalable hardware.
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How many businesses are there which have Google's needs? Ten? Twenty?
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The point is not how many (and the answer to your question is actually "thousands"), but that there is a legitimate need for scalable computer architectures. Scientists need them, design firms need them, vide
Synopsis: ZOMG BOTTALNEXZ!!!!1!! (Score:2)
MS Word is infinitely scalable! (Score:2)
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So far, mostly just Slashdot. Shakespeare seems to be in the offing yet.