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 ADVENTURES
IN SCALE OUT
COMPUTING
JOSH BERNSTEIN
VP TECHNICAL STRATEGY
EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES DIVISION
EMC II

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SCALE OUT VS SCALE UP

• Enterprise vs <Insert Buzzword Here>

• Numbers Matter, Size Matters Not
• Growing Industry Trend

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EARLY PRINCIPLES

• Virtualized
• Scaled Up Fully Day One
• Sensitive to Failure Domains
• Optimized To Operate (Rather then Deploy)
• Designed Our “Scalable Unit”
• Basically Built a Large “Scaled Up” Enterprise

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WHY WE DID IT

• We Were a Very Small Team

• Vendor Dependance Held Value
• Time to Market
• Money Was…

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SCALING OUT
One Data Center

“Work Unit" “Work Unit"

1,000s Servers 1,000s Servers
1PB Storage 1PB Storage
HDFS HDFS
Network Network
etc etc

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SCALING OUT
One Data Center

“Work Unit" “Work Unit" “Work Unit"

1,000s Servers 1,000s Servers 1,000s Servers
1PB Storage 1PB Storage 1PB Storage
HDFS HDFS HDFS
Network Network Network
etc etc etc

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WHAT KIND OF SCALE?

• 23 Sites Worldwide
• 8 Countries
• 100s Millions Req/Day
• Half Million Entries In DNS
Courtsey Spaceballs (1987)

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WHAT WE LEARNED
• Manageability Reins Supreme
• Complexity Is Killer
• Snowflakes Are Killers
• Invest In The Edge
• Hadoop Is Hard
• Flexibility Dependent On Vendors

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CHANGES WE MADE

• Decreased Reliance On Vendors

• Migrated To Container Based Deployments
• Broke Up With An EMC Competitor
• Broke Up With <Insert Other Major Companies>
• Doubled Down On Vendors With Value
• Tried To Move Away From POSIX/Block Style Storage

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Industry Outlook

• Largely Unimpressed With Open Stack

• No Good Solution For Distributed Persistence
• Add Value On Top Of Ubiquitous Open Software
• Companies To Watch
– Core OS
– Docker
– Heroku
– Avi Networks

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 THANK YOU

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