Avoiding Death Spirals in Distributed Systems

What's a death spiral? Single-node death spirals A former employer of mine was contracted to build an email routing system for one of the world's largest companies. They had me do the design and spec out the hardware, and then...

Tuning Memcached Timeouts for a Cloud Environment

These days, more and more apps are running in the cloud, and they’re starting to take memcached with them. For example, as we announced earlier this week, nearly 300 applications are using NorthScale’s memcached as a service on Heroku’s Ruby-based...

Why Membase Uses Erlang

Less and less often (because Erlang is becoming more popular), I’m asked why Membase chose to use Erlang for our cluster management and process supervision component. Common alternatives people suggest are Java, C++, Python, Ruby, and, more recently, node.js and...