In between avoiding any real specifics in an interview with GiggaOm’s Stacey Higginbotham Zuckerberg eludes to Facebook running on “tens of thousands” and approaching “hundreds of thousands” of hosts. According to comscore facebook supports up to 65 Billion, yes that is billion with a B, page views a month, or more then 2 Billion a day. Relatively speaking that is a huge number of hosts to support the site. He does talk about how they use memcached extensively but it sounds to me like some general re-architecture is in order. Or is this a VMWARE salesman’s dream?

Well I woke up to another Digg sell out rumor so it must be the first Friday of the month. What is interesting this time is the players couldn’t get much bigger; Google and Microsoft thanks to techcrunch breaking the news. While this has to be the geekiest picture ever on the cover of a magazine it is damn good marketing. Kevin Rose took a suggestion he made to the Slashdot founder over lunch and turned it into the largest social news site that so far can’t be outdone. The digg stack is completely Lamp, High Scalability has the details, and done on a shoestring budget of course with the exception of the support of digg CEO and co-founder Adelson’s Equinox as the founder and CTO. Good idea, reasonable execution, and a solid Ops team, which started with one guy.

Trending is all the rage and rightfully so. To put it as simply as possible this allows us to know what is going to break before it does. We have been using tools like cacti and HitBox for some time now to try and predict what to expect in our upcoming events.

One thing I have always struggled with is the bigger picture. What does the trend look like over the year or into next? Are we, as a whole, gaining ground or loosing it? What makes up those metrics? A new tool similar to Amazon’s Alexa has come out recently called compete.com Compete really isn’t that different but it does something important for me. It reinforces the data that Alexa has had a lock on for years. Using this data I can confidently say yes it does appear we are down 18% year over year.

The next step in all this is translating that into operations speak.. So this means we can reduce our footprint by 18%? Well no not exactly we are serving more dynamic content then ever and oh did we mention the new video service launching next week.. This is in part what makes operations interesting trying to find better ways to help scale but with reduced cost, smaller footprints, and oh right less POWER. Sounds like a topic for another post…..

Good movie quote, recently brought to me by a colleague when discussing the virtues of accountability and owning the health, maintenance and restoration for systems we are responsible for. Broader topic was “monitoring.”

I don’t expect magic, in buckets or within the context of goodness. I do expect that if we are really empowered to engineer and manage systems, we need to ensure they are built correctly and alert us on state and utilization. Empowerment = given the funds we request to build and instrument correctly. Thus far, I haven’t recieved any resistance to properly teed-up requests.

Thus…a good quote: “I don’t wanna hear about no motherf***in’ ifs. All I wanna hear from your ass is, You ain’t got no problem, David (Jules). I’m on the motherf***er!”