Architecture

http://www.aosabook.org/en/index.html so called AOSA book. " Architects look at thousands of buildings during their training, and study critiques of those buildings written by masters. In contrast, most software developers only ever get to know a handful of large programs well—usually programs they wrote themselves—and never study the great programs of history. As a result, they repeat one another’s mistakes rather than building on one another’s successes. Our goal is to change that. In these two books, the authors of four dozen open source applications explain how their software is structured, and why. What are each program’s major components? How do they interact? And what did their builders learn during their development? In answering these questions, the contributors to these books provide unique insights into how they think." ...

http://www.aosabook.org/en/index.html so called AOSA book. " Architects look at thousands of buildings during their training, and study critiques of those buildings written by masters. In contrast, most software developers only ever get to know a handful of large programs well—usually programs they wrote themselves—and never study the great programs of history. As a result, they repeat one another’s mistakes rather than building on one another’s successes. Our goal is to change that. In these two books, the authors of four dozen open source applications explain how their software is structured, and why. What are each program’s major components? How do they interact? And what did their builders learn during their development? In answering these questions, the contributors to these books provide unique insights into how they think." ...

http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2011/01/29/how-innodb-performs-a-checkpoint/

http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2011/01/29/how-innodb-performs-a-checkpoint/ An article about MySQL InnoDB checkpoint-ing mechanism written by Perconna folks. Read comments as well, several PostgreSQL core committers have participated in the discussion. “InnoDB’s checkpoint algorithm is not well documented. It is too complex to explain in even a long blog post, because to understand checkpoints, you need to understand a lot of other things that InnoDB does. I hope that explaining how InnoDB does checkpoints in high-level terms, with simplifications, will be helpful. A lot of the simplifications are because I do not want to explain the complexities of how the simple rules can be tweaked for optimization purposes, while not violating the ACID guarantees they enforce.” ...

http://support.rightscale.com/12-Guides/EC2_Best_Practices/EC2_Site_Architecture_Diagrams#Multiple_Availability_Zone_Setup

http://support.rightscale.com/12-Guides/EC2_Best_Practices/EC2_Site_Architecture_Diagrams#Multiple_Availability_Zone_Setup Web architecture site design diagrams from RightScale. It tells you basic ideas how to design redundant web application infrastructure in amazon cloud

http://www.cracktwo.com/2011/04/25-abandoned-soviet-monuments-that-look.html “These structures were commissioned by former Yugoslavian president Josip Broz Tito in the 1960s and 70s to commemorate sites where WWII battles took place” .

http://openfoo.org/blog/amazon_ec2_underlying_architecture.html Some description of EC2 Internals. EC2s are XEN VMs, mine is currently using Xen 3.0.3-rc5-8.1.14.f , which appears to be F14 Xen package re-build on RHEl5.x (this is by looking at compiler version) . Some info in the article appears to a bit outdated

http://www.slideshare.net/adrianco/netflix-in-the-cloud-2011 Slides from Adrian Cockcorft, Netflix director of cloud systems about current state [for 2011] of Netflix’s AWS-based architecture

http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/5-lessons-weve-learned-using-aws.html Notes from netflix tech blog about some key points of their EC2-based infrastructure design. Note that netflix is not affected by the current EBS problems in AWS US-EAST region. Their key point seems to be to equally split your infrastructure between 3 AZs (availability zones) and run at ~30% capacity, so if 2 AZs fail (as we have now) you would still running in one AZ @ 90%