[ This is my personal blog so all opinions expressed here are mine. I am a product, scalability, operations and monetization advisor and currently employed as Director of Business Operations & Technical Strategy for a top 50 website that delivers billions of page views per month. I was a keynote panelist for Scaling Up or Out keynote at MySQL Conference and speak regularly at conferences and user groups.
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Since scalability is considered a non-functional requirement, it is often overlooked in the hopes of decreasing time to market. Adding scalability down the road can decrease the time to market but only after assuming significant technical debt.
Balancing performance and scalability vs. fast iteration and cost efficiency can be a significant challenge for startups. The good news is that achieving this balance is not impossible. Here are a few tips to help you build a scalable startup.
1. Scalable startups start with the right foundation: A scalable foundation means that as you experience growth, you can throw hardware at the problem in a cost-efficient way giving you the most bang for your buck. Scaling up can become very expensive very quickly.
2. Scalable startups choose the right language and platform: Choosing the right development language is critical to building a scalable startup. If you choose a platform that gets the product out the door quickly but is inherently un-scalable, you have made the wrong bet.
3. Scalable startups invest in the right talent: Also important is being able to secure the right talent. This goes hand in hand with choosing the right language. Choosing a bleeding edge platform that’s more developer friendly than product friendly can create difficulties down the road when you need to find talent to help scale it. Hiring or seeking advice from an architect in the early days can help save significantly down the road.
4. Scalable startups worry about the right things: When building your startup, you should worry more about the foundation than sweating over performance increases.
5. Scalable startups stay away from building synchronous coupling: The main problem with synchronous coupling is that it makes users wait and ties up system resources that would have otherwise been released. In addition, synchronous operations require infrastructure to be scaled for peak load.
6. Scalable startups worry more about constant response time than latency: Low latency is important but constant response time is even more important. The latter can be achieved by building a foundation that allows for horizontal growth and distribution of load.
7. Scalable startups measure utilization first and then performance Measuring utilization of resources is crucial as it can indicate stress on a system and to what extent resources are being utilized. Measuring performance only helps in being able to speed up response time and is not a qualified measure of ability to handle additional growth.
8. Scalable startups go stateless Maintaining state is expensive. While it is possible to build an infrastructure that can maintain state using a shared system, it is best for scalable startups to build stateless applications.
9. Scalable startups virtualize/abstract everything Abstracting development modules helps keep things manageable. Among other things it allows developers with various skill sets to work on their own layers. For instance, by abstracting the layer that implements and manages database partitioning, you can hide the “ugly” partitioning (sharding) details from the application. This makes it easier to migrate and move logical shards within physical shards.
10. Scalable startups build using APIs APIs are an essential part of building startups as they allow for growth opportunities. Startups that are build using APIs find it easier to scale development, deployment and open up their service.
11. Scalable startups know which shift they belong to: Within the world of scalability, you are either a redshift startup or a blueshift startup. Redshift startups grow faster than Moore’s Law and eventually need to be scaled out. The absolute number of hardware components for redshift startups will continue to increase. Blueshift startups grow at the rate of Moore’s Law or slower and as a result, the infrastructure required for them will continue to curtail. Building an infrastructure that can scale out is suitable and highly recommended for redshift startups.
12. Scalable startups cache everything effectively One of my favorite quotes is “the best IO is no IO,” meaning essentially that the best way to serve data is when you don’t have to hit the disk. This can be achieved easily by effectively caching everything that can benefit from it.
I really wanted to go to "10 Things We've Learned at 37 Signals" session but ended up sitting in David's session "Go REST with Rails." However, I did find notes from Chad Capellman at Crowd Vine.
Tomorrow, I am attending Social Ad Summit which is being held at Tribeca Rooftop. Nick O'Neill has done a tremendous job with the session and speaker lineup which includes:
9:00am - 9:45am - Social Network Advertising • Spencer Ante, Computers Editor at BusinessWeek and author of “Creative Capital” (Moderator) • David Borstein, Director of Sales, MySpace • Bill Alena, VP of Advertising & Business Development, MyYearbook.com • Mike Trigg, Director of Marketing, hi5 • Martin Green, COO, Meebo • Mark Dillon, Vice President of National Sales, Classmates.com
10:00am - 10:45am - Media Buying on Social Networks • Brian Morrissey, Digital Editor, AdWeek (Moderator) • Shiv Singh, Vice President of Social Media & Global Strategic Initiatives, Avenue A | Razorfish • David Bear, Executive Director of Mobile, BBDO • Jennifer Bertheaud, Director of Account Management & Strategy, Noise • David Berkowitz, Director of Emerging Media, 360i
10:45am - 11:00am - Sponsored Plenary Keynote • Mike Lazerow, CEO & Founder, Buddy Media
11:00am - 11:15am - Sponsored Plenary Keynote • Gordon Peters, General Manager, SocialCash.com
11:15am - 12:00pm - Branded Experiences on Social Networks • Ian Schafer, CEO, Deep Focus (Moderator) • Scott Monty, Global Digital & Multimedia Communications Manager, Ford Motors Company • Deborah Korb, Brand Manager, JP Morgan • Don Steele, VP of Digital Marketing, MTV Networks
1:45pm - 2:30pm - Social Ad Network Solutions • Allen Stern, Editor, CenterNetworks (Moderator) • Gordon Peters, General Manager, SocialCash.com • Seth Goldstein, CEO & Co-Founder, SocialMedia • Anu Shukla, Founder & CEO, Offerpal • Scott Rafer, CEO, Lookery • Chris Cunningham, CEO, appssavvy
2:45pm - 3:30pm - Social Advertising Metrics • Sean Ammirati, Contributor at Read/Write/Web, Founder of mSpoke (Moderator) • Albert Lai, CEO, kontagent • Ian Swanson, Co-Founder & CEO, Sometrics • Cam Balzer, VP of Emerging Media, Doubleclick Performics • Jodi McDermott, Director of Analytics, Clearspring
3:35pm - 4:20pm - Widget Monetization • Kevin Barenblat, Co-Founder & CEO, Context Optional • Hooman Radfar, CEO & Co-Founder, Clearspring • Carnet Williams, Co-Founder & CEO, Sprout • Sam Wick, Head of Business Development, Userplane • Ben Pashman, VP of Sales & Business Development, Gigya • Heidi Henson, Director of Advertising, RockYou
4:30pm - 5:15pm - Alternative Social Advertising • Mike Lazerow, CEO & Founder, Buddy Media • Matt Sanchez, CEO, VideoEgg • James Gross, Director of Sales, Federated Media • Alex Blum, CEO, KickApps • Clara Shih, Director of AppExchange Product Line, salesforce.com and Creator, Faceforce • Ari Gottesmann, Co-Founder, Sightix
5:30pm - 7:00pm Networking reception with open bar.
It should be a lot of fun and I am looking forward to it.
Now there is a panel, Working the Clouds: NextGen Infrastructure for New Entrepreneurs. Panelists include: * Geva Perry GigaSpaces * Jason Hoffman Joyent * Tony Lucas XCalibre * Lew Moorman Rackspace * Christophe Bisciglia Google * Joe Weinman AT&T
CB: Google App Engine can be called a cloud but it is a little different that allows you to only focus on very high levels.
Q: Are we selling our souls when moving to cloud? Or should we not worry about lock-in? There are no standards yet. To take advantage of cloud you need to embed it into code. It does create some locking issues. Hopefully in future there will be standards. If you're going to scale on EC2 and have scripts to automatically launch instances then moving to a different cloud will create issues. A lot of clouds that are gaining traction have very custom APIs. There is going to be a proprietary stack. On the other hand we will see convergence towards standards based platform. Then we end up with choice where you will then make decision based on your strengths.
There is still value in proprietary technologies. The more value you are going to build for your customers, the more proprietary the technology behind it would be. Both open and proprietary markets have their potential.
Even though App Engine is proprietary, the documentation is very open. If you are using Big Table, you are kind of selling your soul. Until Google open sources BigTable so users can export their data, it is locked-in.
API that Google provides isn't specific to BigTable. One of the criteria is how scalable the platform is. Christophe Bisciglia thinks that Google is a step ahead of Google when it comes to BigTable and their platform.
One shouldn't be locked into proprietary data store, period.
But, CB insists that BigTable performs better. There are things for which relational databases don't perform well. There is a sacrifice but it allows you to scale. What differentiates providers is how low their latency is and how scalable the infrastructure is and how protected the data is.
LM: A lot of companies are not right away ready for cloud.
The dirty little secret model for cloud computing is that if licensing models don't catch up, everything can drop dead.
Application development 5-10 years from now will be focused on the need to scale. The challenge is to move people up to cloud and provide them with tools to develop their applications the right way.
Thought shift is required for enterprises to move to cloud. CB gives an example of how people were hesitant to use banks when they came around as people were nervous of keeping their money with someone else. But then, as people realized the dangers of not keeping money at bank, banking became the norm.
AT&T will be spending $20 billion on their infrastructure.
Enterprises want to sign a contract. They don't want to just go and use credit card to start a relationship like this.
There is a big marketing problem. The word cloud means less and less everyday. Cloud is getting into the enterprise through the backdoor.
Werner Vogels is now giving a keynote. He is the CTO of Amazon.com.
At Structure 10, the whole discussion will be different. We will be talking about different business models. This is a snapshot at the beginning of the movement. He showed an Animoto video presentation created by him.
What's so special about Animoto? They have no server infrastructure, even though what they do is very compute intensive. When they had 25,000 customers they were hovering around 50 instances. They launched a Facebook app that allowed you to import photos, create video and post it back to Facebook. At that point, they started signing up 25,000 customers per hour. They had to increase their instances to more than 5,000. Imagine Animoto going to VC and asking for money for 5k servers.
Cloud computing is moving the world from capital expenditure (CAPEX) to operating expenditure (OPEX). We are moving to a variable cost model.
Amazon is now in 7 countries with more than 79 million active customer accounts.
Bandwidth used by AWS is way higher than Amazon store.
Amazon used to be a technology consumer. Now, there is no third party software left at Amazon because of scale. There are more than 1M+ sellers. They moved from single application to a platform.
First 5-6 years, uptil 2001, Amazon was like a traditional site. The challenge was how do they keep scaling? How will we make it to the next year. Around 2001, Target came to Amazon and asked to be integrated. At the same time, a number of architecture pieces broke. Then they wanted to move to a platform while working on integrating Target.
At times, Amazon was thinking of going back to mainframe. They wanted to create a very agile environment.
They created an infrastructure where no direct database connections were allowed. Everything must go through a business logic layer.
The gateway page on Amazon can use upto 200+ services to be created.
The 70/30 switch
Companies now have to become experts in many areas not related to their business and answer questions like, why is BGP protocol not stable?, why do datacenters go down? etc. These companies are spending upto 70% of time, energy and dollars on undifferentiated heavy lifting.
Only 30% of time, energy and dollars are spent on differentiated value creation.
He is showing a photo of destroyed datacenter. If your data was in that datacenter, it is gone!. Now talking about 365 main which did 'everything right.' 6 of their 8 diesel generators failed and brought Web 2.0 down. At Amazon, the thought is to survive an entire datacenter failure.
Don't depend on Raid-5 to protect your data.
Peak capacity management is a big issue for companies such as Walmart.com and Target.com that experience seasonal spikes in traffic.
They wanted to cover three areas: compute, messaging and storage. EC2 covers compute, S3, Simple DB and EC2 PS (Persistent storage) covers storage and SQS is the fabric that holds everything together. EC2-PS still doesn't has a name.
Most data at Amazon was key-value based. There were secondary key accesses. SimpleDB was a compliment to S3.
It's easy for companies to spend as much as 70% of their intellectual capacity in scaling.
Infrastructure Services Drivers
Security
Scalablity
Availability
Performance
Cost-effective
Next he is showing example of SmugMug who relies heavily on Amazon's EC2 and S3. They currently have 600TB of pictures stored in Amazon S3. In Amazon S3 there are more than 18 billion objects as of March 2008.
SmugMug is now venturing in different businesses where they provide interface to allow you to store anything. The product is called Smugmug Vault.
Addressing Uncertainty
Acquire resources on demand and release them
pay for what you use
leverage other's core competencies
turn fixed cost into variable
What sense does it makes to order a lot of hardware when you don't even have a product? You also aren't sure how many customers you'd get.
Cloud computing is a lot of fog, a little cold. A lot of activity going on in cloud computing world. Companies are spending a lot of money on infrastructure. Few top companies spent over $6 billion in infrastructure. There are so many issues with infrastrcture: scaling out, power etc.
There is a video message from Nick Carr.
- Structure is happening at the same time Bill Gates is retiring - Fundamental unit of computing is shifting from individual computer to datacenter or grid computing. - A lot of technical challenges such as reliability, energy efficiency are becoming center to competitive advantage. - Management of infrastructure is becoming more and more important. - Functioning of data center is becoming very important - Moving from IT provided locally to grid/over the network - We don't know what the ultimate structre of the industry will be. - Structure will be crucial to success. - Electric current didn't have ethical dimension to utility. It was ethically neutral. - Computing involves information, personal information which has a very important ethical component.
Om takes the stage again.
twitter.com/structure08 Official tag for conference is structure08.
Next up is Bill Coleman (Cassatt Corporation) who is responsible for B in BEA. He is also credited for his work on Solaris. Currently he is CEO of Cassatt Corporation. The talk is about Green Data Centers.
What we are doing today in data centers is unsustainable. He calls them 'your father's data center'
Concerns
first is energy cost
second is operations cost. IDC says it has gone from 25% to 75%.
everything is a lot more complex today than it was 15 years ago.
how we got here? this is a consequence of innovation. In 1990, people were putting networks in data centers. Then came storage, followed by software people who wanted multi-tiered applications. Then came DBAs :)
Then came virtualization. Is it end of IT? We are doing things still as it is 1960s. There is no automation involved, everything must be changed physically.
We are at end of sustainability of data centers as we know it today.
Virtualization makes scale a little bit better. All we are doing is pushing back the ends.
1.0 of cloud: i can build a green field application with proprietary
2.0 of cloud: functions of PC now exist in cloud. it will still be proprietary.
Apple invented PC but didn't commoditize it.
Very low utilization rates. The next phase of cloud computing will offer higher utilization rates.
Thanks Bill for a great insight into green data centers.
I arrived here yesterday night afer a very long flight and am sitting with Anthony Lopez and Dan White of Cafe Mom. Steve Souders (Google), Jesse Robbins (O'Reilly Radar) are now on the stage. They are talking about how Velocity got started. They completed a five minute speech in two (hey, it's a performance conference).
If all goes well, I will be blogging about several sessions at Velocity.
Graphing Social Patterns is the premier conference on the topic of social networking and social graphs. The conference is being held in Washington DC.
In a few moments I will be leaving to attend Graphing Social Patterns East. The drive is about four hours so not too bad. I always enjoy driving this route as my first driving route in the US was from German Town, MD to New York.
I wanted to go to Graphing Social Patterns West as well but couldn't so I am very excited to attend the east one. I plan to learn about the inner workings of the platforms and engage in networking opportunities at the conference.
The conference explores social networks from two interesting perspectives:
Business & Marketing Strategy:
* LinkedIn: The Business Social Network * MySpace and Facebook Social Advertising * Apps & Widgets: The New New Ad Units * Social Advertising & "App"-vertising * 10M in 10 Weeks: What Stanford Learned Building Facebook Apps * Social Networks & the NEED for FEEDS * Social Networks for Mobile Devices
App Development & Technical Strategy:
* Google OpenSocial + AppEngine Technical Overview * Poke Back: Facebook Platform Team Live Chat * Bring Your Own Platform (BYOP) * Social Games for Social Platforms * Geek Metrics: App Analytics for Distribution, Engagement, & Monetization * OpenSocial: Open for Business * VIRAL vs STICKY: Designing Social Apps for Reach & Retention * Show Me the Money: App Monetization
The keynotes at the Graphing Social Patterns conference include:
LinkedIn: The Business Social Network by Adam Nash
MySpace Business & Marketing Overview
Facebook Business & Marketing Solutions by Kent Schoen
Google OpenSocial + AppEngine Technical Overview by Patrick Chanezon and Paul McDonald
Technical Overview: The MySpace Developer Platform (MDP) by Allen Hurff
Poke Back: Facebook Live and Interactive by Benjamin Ling, Dave Morin, Ruchi Sanghvi, Josh Elman and Dave McClure.
It should be a lot of fun to see old friends and make new ones. If you are attending, ping me via this blog or by email (on the top right hand side) and let's meet up for a drink or two ;)
I am going to Structure 08, a conference being organized by GigaOm that focuses on cloud computing and how it is changing the landscape of computing infrastructures.
If your organization is contemplating traditional server based infrastructure vs. cloud computing, then this conference is for you.
“Structure 08 will gather the most innovative and influential industry leaders together to explore the latest Internet infrastructure buildout. It will sort through the emerging and disruptive computing technologies and inform businesses on how best to leverage them. And it will provide insight to investors and executives on the best implementations, ideas and startups out there today — and what to look for tomorrow.” The conference has a star studded line of speakers including:
Werner Vogels - VP and CTO, Amazon.com
James Crowe - President and CEO, Level 3
Greg Papadopoulos - CTO, Sun Microsystems
Parker Harris - Founder, Salesforce.com
Mendel Rosenblum - Co-founder, VMWare
Zach Nelson - President & CEO, NetSuite
Christophe Bisciglia - Sr Software Engineer, Google
Jonathan Heiliger - VP, Technical Ops, Facebook
Joe Weinman - VP, Strategic Solutions, AT&T
Debra Chrapaty - Corporate VP, Microsoft
Jeremiah Robison - CTO, Slide
Dr. Albert Esser - VP, Data Center Infrastructure, Dell
Lew Moorman - SVP Strategy, Rackspace
Akash Garg - CTO, hi5 Networks, Inc.
Sandy Jen - Co-founder & VP, Engineering, Meebo
Danny Kolke - Founder & CTO, Etelos
Om Malik - Founder & Editor, Giga Omni Media
Geva Perry - CMO, GigaSpaces Technologies
Scott Wiener - CTO, Cloud9 Analytics
Dave Schrader - Dir, Strategy & Marketing, Teradata
Harald Prokop - SVP of Engineering, Akamai Technologies
Scott Yara - President & Co-founder, Greenplum
The one day Structure 08 conference will be held on June 25 at Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF, 1675 Owens Street, San Francisco, CA 94158.
I hope to meet new and old friends at the Structure 08 conference. I will be in the area a few days before the conference as I am also attending Velocity Conference by O'reilly. It will be great to meet up if you are in the area.
This year, I was part of a keynote panel, Scaling Up or Out, at the MySQL Conference and Expo along with Jeff Rothschild of Facebook/Accel Partners and Paul Tuckfield of YouTube. The event was attended by more than 2,000 attendees.
Keynote Panelists from left to right: Monty Taylor (MySQL),Matt Ingenthron (Sun), John Allspaw (Flickr), me, Domas Mituzas (MySQL/Wikipedia), Jeff Rothschild (Facebook) and Paul Tuckfield (YouTube)
Sheeri took a video of the keynote session that can be viewed below.
Video of Scaling Up or Out keynote session: -
To read more about this scalability keynote, view pics and to watch more videos, see my Scaling Up Or Out Keynote post.
I am going to 
