Featured Topic on InfoQ today is "Performance and Scalability." In particular I enjoyed watching a video/slideshow presentation by Dan Pritchett of Ebay called Architecture Quality: Operational Manageability. Here are some of my comments, take away, and thoughts.

This is a great watch for any developers and executives that want to understand a little bit more about what technology operations teams face from day to day.

One of my favorite quotes, "Reality: Inefficient software has driven data centers to the brink of municipal power delivery capabilities." I can tell you that almost no one understands this concept at all. So, it's refreshing to hear someone say it out loud anyway. What if your software was "charged" by the unit for the power your code used? How would that change your software design? I think if we look into the past, we'll see things have been this way already. In a way, pay by the hour types of utility computing resources like EC2 can push you to a more efficient design. If you need a large instance instead of a small it costs quite a lot more per hour for example.

"Grid provides the framework for operational scalability." Remember, in general and in my opinion, grid equals cloud. Essentially though, it's not a silver bullet. You still have to architect your software properly to make it all work.

Another one, "Developers bonuses take a hit when site availably misses." Developers carry pagers and also have to get up in the middle of the night with operations to "feel the pain" they cause.

The biggest take away, and I have a lot more to say about this, is that operations, development, and business must communicate and work together from the very beginning.

Design for failure and rollback.

Resources:

The Topic at InfoQ: http://www.infoq.com/performance-scalability/

The Presentation (41:27) - http://www.infoq.com/presentations/operational-manageability