Scalability for Startups (Frank Mashraqi, Startonomics SF 2008)

Startup Scalability Strategies Frank Mashraqi

Hello!

Agenda
Keeping score: What to measure?
Discerning the difference: What to focus on?
Finding your path: Which way to go?
Choosing your architecture: How to partition?
Walking the line: How to balance?
Building your team: Who to hire?
Thinking ahead: What about the future?
Offloading scalability: Is it for me?

Keeping Score: What to Measure? client response time memory utilization throughput cache utilization reads per second thread thrashing disk utilization disk response time failure rates resource utilization IO wait swap utilization
cache prunes
threshold exceptions exceeding high or low water marks
cache hit ratio
writes per second threads created transactions per second connections usage distribution of data disk saturation locking statistics growth rate queries per shard threads running CPU Saturation memory/ IO contention connections per shard

Performance !=
High Availability !=
Scalability

Performance
Ability to process or execute a task compared to time and resources used

High Availability
Ability of a system to ensure a certain degree of operational continuity flickr.com/photos/mag3737

Scalability
Ability to handle growing amounts of traffic in a graceful manner or ability to be readily enlarged : freefoto.ca/key/viewpoint?g2_itemId=7348

Pick any two!!
C onsistency
A vailability
P artition-Tolerance
Choose if you don’t care about 24/7 availability or accommodating high traffic.
Choose for a site that must be available 24/7
Choose for a high traffic website

Vertical or Horizontal?
Vertical
Aka Scaling up
Adding resources to a node
Getting a bigger server
Using faster CPUs
Twice as fast servers can be more than twice expensive
Horizontal
Aka Scaling out
Adding more nodes
Cost efficient
Commodity hardware
increased management complexity
“ more complex” programming model
Right foundation
Throughput and latency between nodes

How to Partition?
Functional Partitioning
Key based partitioning
(users ending in 01 go to server 1)
Range based partitioning
(records ranging from 2M to 4M go to server 8)
Directory server based partitioning
(no pre-defined partitioning scheme, instead a lookup is required)

How to balance?
Balance is easier if the foundation is right
Use agile methodologies
Technical debt is expensive
Technical mortgage is a KILLER!

Before and After
What to do before you get big?
Lay the right foundation
Ability to Shard / Partition
Decouple components
Effectively cache
Have a plan in place
What can wait after things start to grow?
Now focus on micro optimizations
Acquiring and upgrading hardware
Performance optimizations and OS tuning
Implementing High Availability and Disaster recovery
Use CDN

What skills / hires are most crucial to dealing with scalability?

Best Practices
Go Asynchronous
Go Stateless
“ Best IO is No IO”
Cache effectively using shared cache and monitor utilization
Decouple as much as possible
Build using APIs
Easy to scale development and deployment and open up your service
Virtualize/Abstract everything

How to blow up?

Can scalability be outsourced? aka Can Cloud fix Twitter?
Amazon
Google AppEngine
Rackspace
AppNexus
10Gen
Other providers?

Things to take away
Focus on scalability, the rest will follow
Horizontal is better, Vertical is costly
Go Asynchronous
Architect so you don’t have to re-architect
Choose two out of Consistency, Availability and Partition-Tolerance
Measure utilization first, then performance
Choose the right infrastructure & invest in right skills

Appendix
Notes/Tips: http://mashraqi.com/2008/09/startonomics-startup-scalability.html
Personal blog: http://mashraqi.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/mashraqi
MySQL Blog: http://mysqldatabaseadministration.blogspot.com
Email: fmashraqi@yahoo.com

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Scalability for Startups (Frank Mashraqi, Startonomics SF 2008)

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