Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Google Scalability Conference talks available

Nearly all of the talks from the Google Seattle Conference on Scalability are now available on Google Video:Unfortunately, the Amazon.com talk, "Challenges in Building an Infinite Scalable Datastore" by Swami Sivasubramanian and Werner Vogels, does not yet appear to be available.

However, there are two additional talks are available that appear to be part of the conference but were not on the original schedule:From the talks I have watched so far, it looks like it was a fantastic conference. I am disappointed I could not make it.

See also my earlier post, "More on Google Scalability Conference", that has links off to notes some attendees took during some of the talks.

Update: By the way, Marissa's talk, which is light and talks about the future of Google, is most likely to be of broad interest. If you only have time to watch one of these, watch that one. Her presentation is good, but the Q&A session starting at 34:47 is the thing not to miss. Marissa also talks up personalized search at 33:08 of her presentation, saying that it is key for building "the search engine of the future."

Update: In case you don't watch the YouTube talk, let me summarize it briefly. They tried to do MySQL database replication, faced many problems for a long time, and finally switched to what they should have done in the first place, large scale database partitioning. Unfortunately, this is a common mistake at many places struggling with scaling, overdoing database replication and caching and underdoing partitioning.

2 comments:

PetrolHead said...

Re: the amazon talk, Werner has a little news on this:

http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/07/reading_references.html#comments

chad said...

I wonder if/when Google will open their bigtable / mapreduce apis up to 3rd parties? I could see people using Akmai-style services for expensive calculations, data storage, etc. as a hybrid to offload the problem of server maintenance. A quote from Marissa Mayer:

http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-6196341.html?part=rss&tag=2547-1_3-0-20&subj=news

"We just have so many ideas that we can't implement...so it makes sense to open it up. The coup de grace would be letting people build on our platform, on our servers," she said. That idea is complicated and thus "something we're interested in, but we haven't made many advances on" it, she added.