Queueing systems manage and process queues of jobs. The presence of a queue implies that something cannot be done immediately and one has to wait until some resource is available. When you respond to an HTTP request you usually want to do it interactively, that is, you want to respond within some reasonable amount of […]
So how do you store a lot of data if there is already over your head? The simplest answer is: partition horizontally, in other words divide and conquer. In horizontal partitioning each data instance is stored on a single storage node, so you can increase your total capacity by adding more nodes. For horizontal partitioning […]
I wanted to write an article about secrets of scalability, but it appears that this subject is too complex for one article. Instead let’s just dissect some scalability problems as we go. When you think about scalability, it is important to distinguish two different types of problems: those that require reading much more often than […]