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ScaleConf 2013


I attended ScaleConf a few weeks back.

It was a really great conference - perhaps the best I have ever attended.

  • Kirstenbosch Gardens is a fantastic venue. I took every opportunity between talks and after lunch to walk around the gardens and just absorb the peacefulness of the place.
  • The speakers in general have interesting talks. And it is always interesting to hear from international speakers about the scaling issues they face. 
  • And the food - both snacks and lunch at Moyo - was fantastic. 

Here are a few of themes I took away with me:

  1. Scale horizontally, not vertically. 
  2. Do this by decoupling your service into smaller independent systems and use message queuing (RabbitMQ and friends) to get data to appropriate components. 
  3. Use NOSQL/memcache/key-value stores where possible since relational DBs don't scale well. 
  4. And measure everything so you know when stuff is broken.
I'd highly recommend attending next year if you get the opportunity. 


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