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Philly Emerging Technologies Podcast 2011 – #2
Doing the Mundane a Million Times a Minute
Speaker – Mark Chadwick, Invite Media/Google
From the ETE Session Abstract
When dealing with high-volume distributed systems, even the most mundane tasks can be daunting challenges. This talk describes some of the steps, as well as missteps, made while building such a system. It will work through the discovery of such pain points, as well as describe their resolutions with specific technologies or patterns.
Over the course of three years, Invite Media built a high-volume system for serving online advertisements from the ground up. Some of the more interesting challenges revolved around operating routine services at scale, such as distributing requests, logging diagnostics, and keeping track of simple transactions.
This talk will dive into some of these problems, showing the evolution of simple systems at scale, with a strong bias towards cloud-hosted applications. It will include details about the discovery and resolution of bottlenecks we experienced, as well as specific technologies and pattens discovered in the process.
It may serve as a springboard for ideas when building distributed cloud-based systems, as well as hone a sense of when components may be reaching their tipping point.