1. Scaling Systems:
Architectures that Grow
Fundamental Patterns for scaling you can
implement incrementally
Kendall Miller

2. Who Am I?
• Kendall Miller
• One of the Founders of Gibraltar
Software
• Small Independent Software Vendor Founded in
2008
• Developers of VistaDB and Loupe
• Engineers, not Sales People
• Enterprise Systems Architect &
Developer since 1995
• BSE in Computer Engineering,
University of Illinois Urbana-
Champaign (UIUC)

3. What Do We Do?
Advanced logging and analysis of errors,
performance, and usage patterns for .NET
web apps, desktop apps and services
The easy-to-deploy, SQL Server-compatible,
pure .NET embedded database.

4. Fair Warning

5. What is Scale?
Scaling is the ability to
cope and perform under
an increasing workload.

6. What is Scale?
Scaling to a load =
available sustaining that
load

7. What is Scale?
Being available is really
about a request being
completed in a period of
time.

8. What is Scale?
•Requests per Unit Time
•Maximum Request
Latency

9. Microsoft.com
Twitter.com
Amazon.com
Target.com
Slashdot.org
DevExpress.com
Hanselman.com
Gibraltar
Software
1.00E+00 1.00E+01 1.00E+02 1.00E+03 1.00E+04 1.00E+05 1.00E+06 1.00E+07 1.00E+08
What’s your Target?
Average daily traffic in Visitors / Day

10. What’s your Target?
25,000 Visitors/Day = 125,000
Pages/Day
11 High Traffic Hours/Day = 12,000
Pages/Hour
12,000 Pages/Hour = 3.3 Pages/Second

11. Specific Architectures
• Gossip
• Map Reduce
• Tree of Responsibility
• Stream Processing
• Scalable Storage
• Publish/Subscribe
• Distributed Queues
• Load Balancers +
Shared Nothing Units
• Load Balancers +
Stateless Nodes +
Scalable Storage
• Content Addressable
Networks
• General Peer to Peer

12. ACD C

13. ACD/C
• Async – Do the work whenever
• Caching – Don’t do any work you
don’t have to
• Distribution – Get as many people to
do the work as you can
• Consistency – We all agree on these
key things

14. Async
• Decouple operations so you do the
minimum amount of work in
performance critical paths
• Queue work that can be completed
later to smooth out load
• Speculative Execution
• Scheduled Requests (Nightly
processes)

15. Caching
• Save results of earlier work nearby
where they are handy to use again
later
• Apply in front of anything that’s time
consuming
• Easiest to apply from the left to the
right
• Simple strategies can be really
effective (EF Dump all on update)

16. Why Caching?
• Loading the world is impractical
• Apps ask a lot of repeating questions.
• Stateless applications even more so
• Answers don’t change often
• Authoritative information is expensive

17. Distribution
• Distribute requests across multiple
systems
• Classic web “Scale Out” approach
• The less state held, the easier to
distribute work.
• Distributed database = hard
• Distributed static content server = easy
• Request routing for distribution can
serve other availability purposes

18. Consistency
• The degree to which all parties
observe the same state of the system
at the same time
• Scaling inevitably requires
compromise
• Forces one source of the truth for absolute
consistency and requires extensive locking to
ensure parties agree
• The real world doesn’t require the consistency we
tend to demand of our systems

19. Consistency Challenges
• Singleton Data Structures (Order
numbers..)
• State held between the endpoints of
a process
• Consistent results of queries across
partitioned datasets

20. Typical Application
Client
(Web
Browser)
Server
(Web
Server)
Storage
(Database)
Session State
SSL Session
Log Contention
Memory Allocation/GC
Network Sockets
Request Queue
Transaction Isolation
Reader/Writer Locks
Singleton Data Structures

21. Caching
Client
(Web
Browser)
Server
(Web
Server)
Storage
(Database)
100% 50% 10% 1%

22. Client
(Web
Browser)
Distribution
Server
(Web
Server)
Storage
(Database)
Client
(Web
Browser)
Client
(Web
Browser)
Client
(Web
Browser)
Server
(Web
Server)
Session State and Identity
need to be factored out
Partition (Sticky Session)
First, then stateless nodes

23. Server
(Web
Server)
Client
(Web
Browser)
Partitioned Storage Zones
Server
(Web
Server)
Storage
(Database)Client
(Web
Browser)
Client
(Web
Browser)
Client
(Web
Browser)
Server
(Web
Server)
Server
(Web
Server)
Storage
(Database)

24. Server
(Web
Server)
Client
(Web
Browser)
Partitioned Storage Intra-Zone
Orders
Client
(Web
Browser)
Client
(Web
Browser)
Client
(Web
Browser)
Server
(Web
Server)
Products
Customer B
Server
(Web
Server)
Server
(Web
Server)
Inventory

25. Server
(Web
Server)
Asynchronous Processing
Orders
Server
(Web
Server)
Products
Server
(Web
Server)
Server
(Web
Server)
Inventory
Order
Queue
Order
Processing
Server

26. Fresh Problems

27. Fallacies of Distributed Computing
• The network is reliable
• Latency is zero
• Bandwidth is infinite
• The network is secure
• Topology doesn’t change
• There is one administrator
• Transport cost is zero
• The network is homogeneous

28. Client
(Web
Browser)
Fresh Problems: Partial Failures
Server
(Web
Server)
Storage
(Database)
Client
(Web
Browser)
Client
(Web
Browser)
Client
(Web
Browser)
Server
(Web
Server)

29. Fresh Problems: Partial Failures
• Break system into individual failure
zones
• Monitor each instance of each zone
for problems
• Route around bad instances

30. Without monitoring,
redundancy is worthless

31. Server
(Web
Server)
Client
(Web
Browser)
Fresh Problems: Upgrades
Server
(Web
Server)
Storage
(Database)Client
(Web
Browser)
Client
(Web
Browser)
Client
(Web
Browser)
Server
(Web
Server)
Server
(Web
Server)
Storage
(Database)

32. Fresh Problems: Upgrades
• Break system into individual upgrade
zones
• Upgrade each zone – Drain & Stop,
Upgrade, Verify.
• Cut traffic over to updated zones

33. Design for Software
Update From the Start
• Don’t forget Data Schemas

34. Bring It All Home
Don’t worry, we got this.

35. Bringing Home the Bacon
Testing
Testing
Testing

36. Critical Lessons Learned
• ACD/C
• Clear Consistency
Strategy
• Build in monitoring
and management

37. Thanks!
Twitter
@KendallMiller
Email
Kendall@GibraltarSoftware.co
m
Blog
Rocksolid.GibraltarSoftware.co