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Thursday, August 19, 2004 |
The scalability myth.
At one time or another, nearly every kind of information technology has
been judged and found wanting. The failures are often summed up in that
most damning of epithets: "It doesn't scale." The reason, of course, is
that at one time or another, for one reason or another, every kind of
information technology has failed to scale.
Unfortunately for the victims tarred with that brush, scalability is a
wildly imprecise term. Applications may be expected to scale up to
massive server farms or scale down to handsets. And size is only one
axis of scalability. Others include bandwidth, transactional intensity,
service availability, transitivity of trust, query performance, and the
human comprehensibility of source code or end-user information display.
...
It's tempting to conclude that the decentralized,
loosely coupled Web architecture is intrinsically scalable. Not so.
We've simply learned -- and are still learning -- how to mix those
ingredients properly. Formats and protocols that people can read and
write enhance scalability along the human axis. Caching and
load-balancing techniques help us with bandwidth and availability. But
some kinds of problems will always require a different mix of
ingredients. Microsoft has consolidated its internal business
applications, for example, onto a single instance of SAP. In this case,
the successful architecture is centralized and tightly coupled.
For any technology, the statement "X doesn't scale" is a myth.
The reality is that there are ways X can be made to scale and ways to
screw up trying. Understanding the possibilities and avoiding the
pitfalls requires experience that doesn't (yet) come in a box. [Full
story at InfoWorld.com]
Based on the reaction so far, it seems like this piece went over well. It's so nice to be able to track reactions that way.
... [Jon's Radio]
9:39:38 AM  Google It!.
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Yet Another Plea for Full Text Feeds. Simple RSS Customizations
"The default Movable Type installation automatically publishes RSS feeds
for your weblog. The most widely used template - RSS 1.0 Index -
generates an RDF file, index.rdf. The default setting on this file
produces a feed with the entry excerpt. Here are some simple changes you can make to your RSS 1.0 Index template to generate a full entry feed, to create an RSS feed for a specific category or to include comments with your feed...." [Learning Movable Type]
Okay, MT users - it just doesn't get any easier than this. Us RSS bigots
would r-e-a-l-l-y appreciate a full text feed from you, so if you're
not already providing one because you're not sure how to do it, be
confused no more. Here are step-by-step directions, illustrations
included.
Also note that you can save the template shown in this tutorial
under a different name and provide two feeds, one with excerpts and one
with full text. That way, your readers can decide which one works for
them. [The Shifted Librarian]
9:36:31 AM Google It!.
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Campaign Game Mimics Real Life.
A new simulated election game that lets you play campaign manager to a
presidential candidate is both thrillingly and disturbingly similar to
real-world politics. A review by Jason Silverman. [Wired News]
9:32:07 AM Google It!.
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© Copyright 2004 Bruce Landon.
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