PHP – Faster And Cheaper. Scale Vertically with IBM i

PHP – Faster And Cheaper. Scale Vertically with IBM i on Power Systems By Sam Hennessy – Zend Professional Services Consultant

General Rules and Edge Cases
As a general rule, I’d recommend horizontal scaling
There are cases where vertical scaling fits better

Application Design
“ Simplicity, carried to the extreme, becomes elegance.”
Jon Franklin (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

Worse is Better by Richard Gabriel Better to get it out now with 50% to 80% of functionality, than later with 90%.

Worse is Better
Examples from Richard are Unix and C
“ Early Unix and C compilers … require[d] few machine resources to run, and provide about 50% to 80% of what you want.”
“ Unix and C are the ultimate computer viruses.”
“ Once the virus has spread, there will be pressure to improve it…”

Worse is Better
80-20 Rule
20% of the effort yields 80% of the value
A 20% complete product, has 80% of what the users want
“ The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.” - Tom Cargill (C++ Pioneer)

Worse is Better
Another example is Twitter.
Started with a good API, but a limited website.
20% of the work?

Platform Choice “ An underappreciated advantage of a platform approach is junior developers can quickly and confidently create robust applications on top of the platform. If every project needs to create the same distributed infrastructure wheel you’ll run into difficulty because the people who know how to do this are relatively rare.” – A quote referring to Google

Debugging Is Hard
Many layers of abstraction
Remote application calls
Asynchronous processing and message busses
“ Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.” - Brian Kernighan (Unix Pioneer and Creator of cron)

Scalability
“ It’s hardware that makes a machine fast. It’s software that makes a fast machine slow.”
Craig Bruce

Scalability - Planning
How much do you need to scale to?
Internal company application
Shopping cart
Twitter
Facebook
Google search
Capacity planning is difficult for new applications

Horizontal Scalability (Scale Out)

Horizontal Scalability
Solution = Use lots of cheap PCs and spread the work around
Small upfront investment in hardware
Growth costs are fine grained
Well established solution to growth
Generally, an individual web request only needs a small amount of computing resources.

Horizontal Scalability Web Server Database

Reads Master Writes Web Server Web Server Web Server Web Server Web Server Web Server Web Server

Reads Master Writes Slave Slave Web Server Web Server Web Server Web Server Web Server Web Server Web Server

Reads Master Writes Slave Slave Chat Blogs Chat Reads Chat Writes Blog Reads Blog Writes Web Server Web Server Web Server Web Server Web Server Web Server Web Server

Slave Slave Reads Master Slave Slave Chat Blogs Chat Reads Slave Slave Blog Reads Chat Writes Blog Writes Writes Web Server Web Server Web Server Web Server Web Server Web Server Web Server

Chat 1 Read Write Chat 2 Chat 3 Chat 5 Chat 6 Chat 4 Chat 7 Chat 8 Chat 9 Chat 10 Web Server Web Server Web Server Web Server Web Server Web Server Web Server

Chat 1 Read Chat 2 Chat 3 Chat 5 Chat 6 Chat 4 Chat 7 Chat 8 Chat 9 Chat 10 Write Key Lookup Shard Keys Web Server Web Server Web Server Web Server Web Server Web Server Web Server

Chat 1 Read Chat 2 Chat 3 Chat 5 Chat 6 Chat 4 Chat 7 Chat 8 Chat 9 Chat 10 Write Key Lookup Shard Keys Chat 1 Chat 2 Chat 3 Chat 5 Chat 6 Chat 4 Chat 7 Chat 8 Chat 9 Chat 10 Shard Keys Web Server Web Server Web Server Web Server Web Server Web Server Web Server

Horizontal Scaling – Issues With Sharding
No cross-shard SQL queries
No foreign keys, auto_increment’s or transactions
Balancing shards
Power users
Rebalancing after adding more shards

Horizontal Scaling – Issues With Sharding
Networking overheads
Backups
“ This means you have to deal with enforcing integrity on the application level, and you might eventually end up spending a significant amount of your development time on check and fix routines.” - Jurriaan Persyn (Netlog)

Horizontal Scaling
Why?
Simply put, too much complexity
“ You don’t want to shard. Optimize everything else first, and then if performance still isn’t good enough, it’s time to take a very bitter medicine.” - Morgan Tocker (MySQL Performance Blog)

Horizontal Scaling
Peter Says:
In most cases he advises against:
Reading from the slaves
Sharding
Complex replication
Complex high availability designs
“ the recipes from Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo, are not good for like 99.9% of the applications” “ this “smart thing” was [it] truly thought out architecture choice in [the] beginning or it was the choice within code base constrain[t]s” - Peter Zaitsev (MySQL Performance Blog)

Horizontal Scaling - Downsides
Large upfront investment in design, planning and development to allow for horizontal scaling
Difficult to respond to very fast growth
More physical servers also means more:
datacenter space
networking hardware
people
software licenses?

Horizontal Scaling – Comfort Zone
Why is horizontal scaling so prevalent?
It’s been proven to work
Lots of literature on it
“ Better the devil you know than the devil you don't know” - Proverb

Vertical Scalability (Scale Up)
A superior pilot uses his superior judgment to avoid having to exercise his superior skill.
Pilot’s Maxim

Vertical Scaling
The original scaling methodology
One server does everything

Vertical Scaling – Application Impact
Simpler applications means:
Easier to design
Easier to plan
Lower development time
Easier to debug and test
No scalability “features” = Simpler application!

Web Server Database

Web Server (Dev / QA / Stage / Production) Database (Dev / QA / Stage / Production) SVN / CI / Ticket System / WIKI

Why IBM Power Systems?
Completely different mindset from Linux and x86
Self Managing, Self Repairing
Less a scaled up x86 Server, more a scaled down Mainframe.

Why IBM i?
“ Turnkey”
Requires little attention from IT
PHP, MySQL and Apache run natively
DB2 database is built in

IBM Power Systems Upgrade Path
Full binary compatibility
With servers up to:
64 5.0GHz Cores
4TB of RAM
381 TB HDD (32 I/O Draws)
Capacity On Demand

Availability
“ Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window.”
Steve Wozniak ( Apple Computer, Inc. Co-Founder)

Availability
Power Systems availability rating is over 99.9%
Google Apps also guarantees availability for 99.9%
99.9% 8.76 hours downtime

PHP on IBM i
“ Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
Leonardo da Vinci

PHP on IBM i
Zend Core for i5/OS
Runs natively
Ships with IBM i
1 year of Zend Silver Level support included
“ IBM i Toolkit”

PHP on IBM i
Zend Studio for i5/OS
Included in price of IBM i (a.k.a. free)
Debugging integration for the IBM i
Supports the IBM i Toolkit
Best PHP IDE on the market

PHP on IBM i
Zend Platform for i5/OS
Real-time Monitoring (PHP Intelligence)
Op-code cache (Code Acceleration)
Java integration (Java Bridge)
Rule base output caching (Full page caching)
Data caching (Partial page caching)
Zend Download Server

PHP on IBM i
Zend Server 5
Beta coming soon
More performance
Code tracing

Databases
“ Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.”
- Brian Kernigan (Unix Pioneer and Creator of cron)

Databases
MySQL
Runs natively on IBM i
Officially supported by MySQL AB
DB2 Storage Engine for MySQL

Databases
DB2
Mainframe quality database
Integrated into the IBM i operating system
Low maintenance
An IBM i Admin will also be your DB2 DBA

Operations
“ Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges, and it causes end-user and administrator frustration.”
Ray Ozzie (Chief Software Architect at Microsoft)

Consolidation
Hard VMs not Soft VMs
Firmware based
Hardware and OS is VM aware
Dynamic Logical Partitioning
Processor, memory, and I/O resources
Most servers are only using 10% to 20% of there capacity

Costs – IBM Power System Rule of Thumb
Total Cost of Acquisition (TCA) is higher
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is lower

Costs – What Are The Costs?
Personnel is often your highest cost
Value Proposition For IBM Power Servers and i International Technology Group (June 2009)

Costs - Operational
Operations
Most shops don’t need a full time IBM i Admin
IBM i Admins are also DB2 DBA’s
Contractor rate $80 - $150
Use less:
Networking hardware and personnel
Floor space
Energy

Costs - Development Costs
Simpler Applications
Lower development time
Less maintenance cost
Less planning
Reduce management work load
Use of junior developers

Vertical Ceiling
Partition by function
Dedicated database server
New functionality
Refactor current functionality
Move to a larger vertical scaling system (System z)

Final Thoughts
“ Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”
Albert Einstein

Which Is Better?
It’s all about the right tool at the right time.
Neither

Use Case Scenarios
Using Power System will:
Provide a low man-power solution
Ability to use more junior level PHP developers
Or not able to find super stars
Use of IBM i contractor adds no extra load on “IT” or the DBAs
Staffing Problems You have a Hiring Freeze or just an inability to get new people, be them developers, DBA’s or system admin’s.

Use Case Scenarios
Using Power System will:
Allow you to rewrite the rules
Allow you to possibly change the balance of power
The “IT” Stalemate Red tape is killing productivity or your developers ability quickly get things done.

Questions?

Thank You!
Please come find me if you have any more questions
Leave feedback at http://joind.in/888

PHP – Faster And Cheaper. Scale Vertically with IBM i

by Sam Hennessy on Oct 28, 2009

Accessibility

Categories

Tags

Upload Details

Usage Rights

2 Embeds 5

Statistics

PHP – Faster And Cheaper. Scale Vertically with IBM i — Presentation Transcript

http://www.slideshare.net	4
http://translate.googleusercontent.com	1