Amazon's Werner Vogels on Large Scale Systems

ChelleChelle writes "When it comes to managing and deploying large scale systems and networks, discipline and focus matter more than specific technologies. In a conversation with ACM Queuecast host Mike Vizard, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels says the key to success is to have a 'relentless commitment to a modular computer architecture that makes it possible for the people who build the applications to also be responsible for running and deploying those systems within a common IT framework.'"

his comments are only 1/2 true

[Anonymous Coward]

Werner's comments are only 1/2 true. While many of the things he deals with are website centric, there is a whole world behind the website. No one buys from Amazon because of the website necessarily, they buy because the fulfillment is (mostly) accurate and fast. These backend systems are not nearly as clean as werner indicates.

Myopic vision on his behalf imo.

Share nothing architecture?

[QuantumFTL]

I've been programming for many years now, but I'm new to web-app development. I've been learning Ruby on Rails (for various reasons) and one of the points the book I'm reading makes (Agile Development with Rails) is that good scalability is best achieved through the use of a "share nothing" architecture - basically reduction of chokepoints by reduction of shared content in a system.

I'm studying this as I'm looking at scalability concerns in an app I'm putting together, and I did a google search on the topic, but the only thing of interest I could find was this article [zefhemel.com], which doesn't really go into the downsides of this approach. What does slashdot think about this?

Re:Share nothing architecture?

[killjoe]

If I were you I would not worry about scalibility too much. At this point ROR is in production taking 3 million hits a day in at least one production environment. Worrying about scalibility at this stage is premature optimization. You may find that once your application gets to be so popular that ROR can't cut it anymore. More likely you will never even come close to hitting that wall.

Just code using the ROR conventions and you should be fine.

Re:scale?

[syousef]

"the key to success is to have a 'relentless commitment to a modular computer architecture that makes it possible for the people who build the applications to also be responsible for running and deploying those systems within a common IT framework.'"

This works well sometimes. The developer supporting their own application. For other things it makes more sense to divide the role. My experience is that the more complex and customised the software, and the more quickly it is changing, the more important you have people who know the internals as they are currently. However in other circumstances, having ex-developers or professional support staff is often preferable. eg. if there's no current development work, you're going to need support staff (preferably ex-developers, but this may not be an option).