Metablog

Highscalability is Up For Sale

Hi everyone, First, I’d like to sincerely thank everyone who has supported Highscalability over the years. We’ve grown together through some interesting times. Massive changes have occurred in how systems are built, and my goal has always been to help people learn how to build th … | Continue reading

@highscalability.com | 4 months ago

The Swedbank Outage shows that Change Controls don't work

This week I’ve been reading through the recent judgment from the Swedish FSA on the Swedbank outage. If you’re unfamiliar with this story, Swedbank had a major outage in April 2022 that was caused by an unapproved change to their IT systems. It temporarily left nearly a million c … | Continue reading

@highscalability.com | 8 months ago

Lessons Learned Running Presto at Meta Scale

Presto is a free, open source SQL query engine. We’ve been using it at Meta for the past ten years, and learned a lot while doing so. Running anything at scale - tools, processes, services - takes problem solving to overcome unexpected challenges. Here are four things we learned … | Continue reading

@highscalability.com | 9 months ago

Gossip Protocol Explained

You can subscribe to the system design newsletter to excel in system design interviews and software architecture. The original article was published on systemdesign.one website. What Is Gossip Protocol? The typical problems in a distributed system are the following [1], [11]: … | Continue reading

@highscalability.com | 9 months ago

Consistent hashing algorithm

This is a guest article by NK. You can view the original article Consistent hashing explained on systemdesign.one website. How does consistent hashing work? At a high level, consistent hashing performs the following operations: The output of the hash function is placed on a vir … | Continue reading

@highscalability.com | 1 year ago

What is Cloud Computing? According to ChatGPT.

DALL-E picture generated from the answer. I was curious, given all the ChatGPT love, what it would make of some of our favorite topics. I was both impressed and unimpressed. Impressed. ChatGPT instantly generated an response that might make a good answer in a Miss Universe contes … | Continue reading

@highscalability.com | 1 year ago

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For December 2nd, 2022

Never fear, HighScalability is here! 1958: An engineer wiring an early IBM computer 2021: An engineer wiring an early IBM quantum computer. @enclanglement My Stuff: I'm proud to announce a completely updated and expanded version of Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10! This version … | Continue reading

@highscalability.com | 1 year ago

The WhatsApp Architecture Facebook Bought for $19B

Rick Reed in an upcoming talk in March titled That's 'Billion' with a 'B': Scaling to the next ... | Continue reading

@highscalability.com | 1 year ago

The Cloud is Not a Railroad - An Argument Against the Vertical Separation of Cloud Providers

There's a move to regulate cloud providers by vertically separating the services they offer. Like railroads of yore, who were not allowed to provide freight services on top of their base services, cloud providers would not be allowed to provide services on top of their base pla … | Continue reading

@highscalability.com | 1 year ago

Announcing: A Completely New and Updated Version of Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10

I've been working hard on a completely updated version of Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10 and I'm happy to announce it's ready! You can buy version 2.0 at: https://www.amazon.com/Explain-Cloud-Like-Im-10-ebook/dp/B0765C4SNR. If you've already bought, Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10 … | Continue reading

@highscalability.com | 1 year ago

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For July 11th, 2022

Never fear, HighScalability is here! Every cell a universe. Most detailed image of a human cell to date. @microscopicture Other images considered: one byte of RAM in 1946; visual guide on troubleshooting Kubernetes; Cloudflare using lava lamps to generate cryptographic keys; 5MB … | Continue reading

@highscalability.com | 1 year ago

Eric Brewer on Why Banks Are Base Not Acid – Availability Is Revenue

In NoSQL: Past, Present, Future Eric Brewer has a particularly fine section on explaining the o... | Continue reading

@highscalability.com | 1 year ago

Design of a Modern Cache

This is a guest post by Benjamin Manes , who did engineery things for Google and is now doing e... | Continue reading

@highscalability.com | 1 year ago

Reddit: Lessons Learned from Mistakes Made Scaling to 1B Pageviews (2013)

Jeremy Edberg , the first paid employee at reddit, teaches us a lot about how to create a succe... | Continue reading

@highscalability.com | 1 year ago

Latency Is Everywhere and It Costs You Sales – How to Crush It

Update 8 : The Cost of Latency by James Hamilton. James summarizing some latency info from Stev... | Continue reading