Nuiku + Whitepages

This meetup focuses on Scalability and technologies to enable handling large amounts of data: Hadoop, HBase, distributed NoSQL databases, and more!

There's not only a focus on technology, but also everything surrounding it including operations, management, business use cases, and more.

We've had great success in the past, and are growing quickly! Previous guests were from Twitter, LinkedIn, Amazon, Cloudant, Microsoft, 10gen/MongoDB, and more.

This month's guests:

Bill Baker + Chris Hickman, Cofounder and CTO + Senior Developer at Nuiku.

Built-to-scale from day-one.

Nuiku was built-to-scale from day-one. We do scale out our services, we do use a service oriented architecture, we do decouple with queues in certain places and we do automate every bit of our virtual (AWS) data center. We're new, not around a long time and learning about as fast as we can (about what makes sense for our customers.).

Steve Hanks, Principal Data Scientist at WhitePages

Scalability Sucks.

The world of Scalability is glamorous and magical: we get to use cool technologies with sexy names, and magical things happen, we have a tough problem and we throw a Scalability Technology at it, and results flow quickly and easily.

Or so it seems from the outside and/or in the classroom.

Our experience (WhitePages Data Group) has been a quite different. We have significant, challenging problems of scale, both in the size of our data artifacts, and in the number of updates we have to process to keep it accurate and up to date. But our day-to-day lives are much more mundane than the glamorous world where Hadoop meets NoSql meets Scala, and results flow smoothly, and bigger problems are solved by bolting on a node or two.

While we are heavy users of Hadoop, are typically running EC2 instances in the hundreds, and are exploring three of four alternatives to Postgres, we have found no “silver bullet” technology, cutting-edge or otherwise. Rather, for us, scaling problems tend to be insidious and move around a lot, and we feel like firefighters (or worse, like mole-whackers) at least as often as we feel like Data Scientists. I will provide some case studies, examples, and rants, most of which don’t involve Hadoop or other magic bullets.

Our format is flexible: We usually have speakers who talk for ~30 minutes each and then do Q+A, plus discussion.

There'll be beer afterwards, of course!

Meetup Location:

West entrance of Rainier Tower (on 4th Avenue) after 6pm

WhitePages (http://maps.google.com/maps?q=1301+5th+Avenue+%231700%2C+Seattle%2C+WA), 1301 5th Avenue #1600, Seattle, WA

After-beer Location:

Rockbottom Brewery

Doors open 30 minutes ahead of show-time. Please show up at least 15 minutes early out of respect for our first speaker.