Netflix announced Astyanax, an new Java client for Cassandra, and shed some light on how many servers they're using:
Over the past year we have been investing heavily in Cassandra as our primary persistent storage solution. We currently run 55 separate clusters, ranging from 6 to 48 nodes. We've been active contributors to Cassandra and have developed additional tools and our own client library. Today we are open sourcing that client, Astyanax, as part of our ongoing open source initiative. Astyanax started as a re-factor of Hector, but our experience running with a large number of diverse clusters has enabled us to tune the client for various scenarios and focus on wide range of client use cases.
Netflix also posted an article about ephemeral volatile caching on the Netflix tech blog:
In most applications there is some amount of data that will be frequently used. Some of this data is transient and can be recalculated, while other data will need to be fetched from the database or a middle tier service. In the Netflix cloud architecture we use caching extensively to offset some of these operations. This document details Netflix’s implementation of a highly scalable memcache-based caching solution, internally referred to as EVCache.
Netflix director of engineering Daniel Jacobson is a co-author of a book on API's for O'Reilly, and was written up by ReadWriteWeb:
So it is that a software designer ends up becoming one of the public faces of the ideal of API architecture as a business tool. Daniel Jacobson is the lead API engineer for Netflix - arguably the largest single consumer of bandwidth on the entire Internet. His O'Reilly book, APIs: A Strategy Guide, co-authored with Apigee CTO Greg Brail and research editor Dan Wood, deals with the implementation of APIs not so much for software's own exclusive purposes, but moreover as a means of realigning and renovating business' resources overall.
"APIs should not be geeky 'science projects,'" reads the first paragraph of Chapter 4. "They are critical business tools. Successful APIs need clear objectives that relate directly to business objectives and track closely to key performance indicators for the business at large."
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