Memcached and Web Cache Blog

Hot on the heels of Mark’s appearance at NoSQL Live, I’m excited to announce that I’ll be speaking at the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo next month.

Because I'm becoming known as someone who knows something about "this whole NoSQL thing", people have started asking me to take a look at some of their systems or ideas, and tell them which NoSQL technology they should use.

To be fair, it is a confusing space right now, there are a LOT of NoSQL technologies showing up, and there is a lot of buzz from the tech press, and in blogs and on twitter. Most of that buzz is, frankly, ignorant and uninformed, and is being written by people who do not have enough experience running live systems.

Once someone starts using memcached, they tend to quickly find themselves in the state of: "my database servers overload and my site goes down if the memcached stops working". This isn't really surprising, quite often memcached was thrown into the stack because the database servers are melting under the load of the growing site.

But then they face an issue that is, as mathematicians and programmers like to call it, "interesting".

"How do I add more capacity without an outage?"

Just a few years ago, when big sites like Facebook or Netflix were building out their delivery networks to customers, they would build data centers near major internet hubs. That meant setting up shop in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, and New York, as well as at international hubs like London, Madrid, and Tokyo. As long as the data center was close to major population centers, people could get service pretty rapidly.