cloud computing
Late last year, the Netflix Tech Blog wrote about five lessons they learned moving to Amazon Web Services. AWS is, of course, the preeminent provider of so-called "cloud computing", so this can essentially be read as key advice for any website considering a move to the cloud. And
distributed systems
Everybody loves BitTorrent. And rightfully so. With BitTorrent, you also start by placing your large file on a central server. But once the downloading begins, something magical happens: as clients download the file, they share whatever parts of the file they have with each other. Clients can opportunistically connect with
distributed systems
The traditional method of distributing large files is to put them on a central server. Each client then downloads the file directly from the server. It's a gratifyingly simple approach, but it doesn't scale. For every download, the server consumes bandwidth equal to the size of