Dynamic Scaling

Pizza, beer, and mingling.

"Dynamically Scaling Netflix in the Cloud"
Coburn Watson (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/coburn-watson/2/9a7/812) - Manager, Cloud Performance Engineering, Netflix, Inc.

"Shock Absorbers and APIs"
Steve Shah (https://www.meetup.com/SF-Bay-Area-Large-Scale-Production-Engineering/events/92123262/www.linkedin.com/in/steveshah) - Sr. Director, Product Management, Citrix NetScaler

"Setting Up Automated Scaling"
Sebastian Stadil (http://www.linkedin.com/in/sstadil) - Founder, Scalr

"Dynamic Scaling at Pinterest"
Aren Sandersen (http://www.linkedin.com/in/arens) - Head of Tech Ops, Pinterest

Despite all the buzz about it, building a horizontally scalable application for cloud deployment isn't all that different from building one for a physical deployment, except in its ability to change size on-the-fly. Bigger applications have been using commodity hardware and fault-tolerant design to achieve high availability and scalability for a while, but provisioning capacity remains troublesome there. The real addition the cloud brings architecturally is the ability to add new resources instantly, and even change your provisioning profile algorithmically.

This month is about Dynamic Scaling. This can be achieved with tools like Amazon Auto Scaling (http://aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/), by using your favorite cloud providers API and doing it yourself, or by using a third-party service on top of a cloud provider. Which of these are you using? What do you like or dislike about it? What motivated you to use dynamic scaling? Rapid Growth? Cost savings from varying demand? Something else? How do you use dynamic scaling? Does it work for all parts of your application, or just certain parts of it? How quickly can your scaling respond to changes in load? How do you avoid constantly starting and stopping servers when you're on the borderline of needing more capacity?

For our February event, I'd like to see talks about Dynamic Scaling, who's doing it, and how they're doing it.

I'm looking for 2-4 20-25 minute talks. If you can give a talk, please contact me, Chris Westin, through meetup.

As well as the evening's theme talks, we can fit in 2-3 five minute lightning talks at the beginning of the evening; any topic that would be interesting to the #lspe audience is welcome. If you're interested in giving a lightning talk, contact me, Chris Westin, through meetup.