Posts tagged Architecture
Free Webinar: Website Infrastructure Architecture with SEO #SEO – PR Web (press release)
Oct 31st
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Free Webinar: Website Infrastructure Architecture with SEO #SEO
PR Web (press release) Search Engine Academy Washington DC's ( SEA DC) first ever webinar on using search engine optimization (SEO) principles and strategies to develop a website's Infrastructure Architecture (IA) for better content organization to keep visitors on web pages … |
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SEO Smackdown: Information Architecture vs. Technical Architecture – Search Engine Land
Sep 2nd
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SEO Smackdown: Information Architecture vs. Technical Architecture
Search Engine Land Believe it or not, many SEO professionals, developers and other IT professionals do not understand the role of information architecture (IA) in the SEO process. In fact, this group often does not understand the role of IA in the Web development process … |
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Dell and CommVault Create New Virtual Storage Architecture
Jun 7th
Yesterday, at the Dell Storage Forum in Orlando, storage vendor CommVault announced it was partnering with Dell to create a new architecture that the two call Converged Virtual Infrastructure Building Block. While a mouthful (and not something that you make a snappy acronym out of either), the idea is to create a way to make virtual servers easier to replicate and manage.
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By abstracting a lot of information into these basic blocks, it is faster to scale up a virtual server infrastructure. The vendors stated that it took 30 minutes to create persistent EqualLogic snapshot-based recovery copies of 500 virtual machines with a total of 15 TB datastore, largely because it was contained in a single building block. In another 30 minutes, you could replicate another 2,000 VMs.
The currently supported pieces of the architecture include Dell’s PowerEdge Blade servers, EqualLogic Storage networking arrays, VMware vSphere/vCenter and CommVault’s Simpana 9 storage management software. The latter is used to take snapshots of the current state of the VMs and used as part of the backup and provisioning efforts.
Obviously, for this architecture to be truly useful, other storage management and array vendors need to join with their support, but this is a good starting attempt at trying to make it easier for larger-scale mixed-vendor virtual environments to be more automatically provisioned. “We generally steer away from device-specific recipes that have relatively short lives. And we focus first on keeping the VMs running by eliminating storage-related disruptions altogether, irrespective of the hardware choices they make for storage or servers,” says Augie Gonzalez, DataCore Software’s product and channel marketing manager. DataCore makes SANSymphony, a competing storage manager to Simpana.
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New Virtual Index Architecture Helps You Find Your Cloud-based Data
Jun 1st
Today a new company founded by software industry veteran Ed Iacobucci began its operations, along with $8 million in seed funding. Its goal is to fight what Iacobucci calls “data sprawl” by developing a pervasive data indexing programming interface and architecture that will act as a guide across both cloud and private data stores. The idea is to index everything so that users can find files from any particular device, in the cloud, or on their local desktops and servers.
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The company, called VirtualWorks, is still at work creating its Virtual Index Architecture. The indexing will work across both structured and unstructured data, what the company calls content virtualization. The architecture will leave all data in place but just provide pointers to make it easier to access. VirtualWorks will develop a series of cross-tabulating indices that can bridge across multiple systems, and these will augment existing SQL databases, Sharepoint repositories, and other places that contain vast amounts of data. The company claims no integration is required for these indices and developers can easily create index-enabled apps that make it easier to uncover the particular data that you are looking for.
While this seems like grand plans with very little to actually show yet, the team behind VirtualWorks are all old software hands that could pull it off. CEO Iacobucci has been around the computing industry for decades, getting his taste of PCs with the second version of the IBM PC back in the early 1980s and one of the movers behind IBM’s OS/2 efforts in the late 1980s. He left IBM to co-found Citrix and later tried to start a jet leasing service. Lars Morten Nygaard, who is Director, global product management, leads a development team in Norway and has worked in that capacity for Unisys.
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SEO Case Study: Improving the Site’s Architecture – Practical Ecommerce
Mar 25th
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SEO Case Study: Improving the Site's Architecture
Practical Ecommerce Editor's Note: This is the second installment of a search-engine-optimization case study from contributor Jill Kocher on the SEO travails of The Motor Bookstore, a retailer of automotive manuals. Like most ecommerce businesses, The Motorbook Store … |
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3 SEO Myths About Information Architecture – Search Engine Land
Mar 18th
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3 SEO Myths About Information Architecture
Search Engine Land PageRank sculpting, siloing, link-juice flowage, SEO architecture — these are keyword phrases that often make my skin crawl. The reason? I commonly hear these words come from search engine optimization (SEO) professionals in reference to a website's … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Hacker Chat: Pinboard Creator Maciej Ceglowski Talks About Why Boring Architecture is Good, and More
Feb 11th
Maciej Ceglowski created Pinboard in 2009 “partly out of frustration with a redesign of Delicious that I felt removed a lot of utility from the site, and partly because I had long wanted to have a boomarking site that would archive my bookmarks,” according to the About page. Since then, the site has become a popular alternative to Delicious and Ceglowski is now able to make a living on it.
Pinboard runs entirely on a traditional LAMP stack, and it runs amazingly fast. We talked with Ceglowski about the Pinboard architecture and his development process.
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The Pinboard about page says: “There is absolutely nothing interesting about the Pinboard architecture or implementation; I consider that a feature!”
Can you explain why you think that’s a feature?
I believe that relying on very basic and well-understood technologies at the architectural level forces you to save all your cleverness and new ideas for the actual app, where it can make a difference to users.
I think many developers (myself included) are easily seduced by new technology and are willing to burn a lot of time rigging it together just for the joy of tinkering. So nowadays we see a lot of fairly uninteresting web apps with very technically sweet implementations. In designing Pinboard, I tried to steer clear of this temptation by picking very familiar, vanilla tools wherever possible so I would have no excuse for architectural wank.
The other reason I like the approach is that the tried-and-true stuff is extensively debugged and documented. The chances of you finding a bug in MySQL or PHP as the author of a mid-sized website are microscopic. That’s not the case for newer infrastructure like NoSQL or the various web frameworks.
I was actually poking around trying to find out exactly what technology Pinboard used because it was so incredibly fast. With so much interest in cutting edge technologies like Scala, Node.js and MongoDB it’s easy to forget that traditional tools, used correctly, can yield exceptional performance. Do you have any optimization tips for developers using a traditional LAMP stack?
The following come to mind, in no particular order:
- Take advantage of the fact that it’s 2011 and you can load servers up with RAM.
- Use a RDBMS and take the time to learn it very thoroughly. High-Performance MySQL (the O’Reilly Book) and the Percona blog are indispensible for MySQL; I’m sure similar resources exist for Postgres.
- Use dedicated (not virtualized) hardware. I/O can be awful on virtualized servers and debugging I/O slowness there is next to impossible.
- Use caching as a last resort, not as a fundamental design strategy. It’s 2011 – unless you have millions of users, your app should be able to run fast with all caches disabled.
- Use frameworks for prototyping, but build from the ground up once you know what you’re building.
- Resist excessive abstraction
- Set performance targets for yourself. For example, one goal for Pinboard is a median page load time of under a third of a second. This will force you to instrument well and optimize appropriately.
What is the development process for Pinboard like? Do you use Agile methodology?
My development process is quite primitive. I run a local copy of the site on my laptop, test changes manually, check them in, and then deploy to the production server. The only similarity to agile development is the use of frequent small deployments.
One interesting quirk of Pinboard is a complete absence of unit tests. I used to be a die-hard believer in testing, but in Pinboard tried a different approach, as an experiment. Instead of writng tests I try to be extremely careful in coding, and keep the code size small so I continue to understand it.
I’ve found my defect rate to be pretty comparable to earlier projects that included extensive test suites and fixtures, but I am much more productive on Pinboard.
Do you work on Pinboard for a living?
Yes, it’s my full-time job.
What were you doing before Pinboard?
I was a contractor, working mainly on search and recommendations engines for Rails-based startups.
How many developers work on Pinboard?
I do all the coding. My girlfriend helps with invoicing and localization, and Peter helps with ops and feature design.
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