SimpleGEO: Staying Agile at Scale

Rapid adoption of consumer web applications and Internet connected devices has pushed distributed systems work out of academia into mainstream web development. This talk will cover how we've used tools like Apache Cassandra, Flume, node.js, Hadoop, and RabbitMQ at SimpleGeo to create scalable, fast, adaptable, and resilient systems -- all critical architectural characteristics.

As an infrastructure services company, it's critical that our systems stay fast and robust at scale. As a startup, we're keen to keep costs down and returns high, and as a young company agility is doubly important. The traditional LAMP stack forces hard compromises on some of these points. Modern generic distributed systems are more flexible in this respect, and provide facilities for making compromises at a more granular level. These cutting edge technologies certainly have their own sharp points. But for us the benefits have far outweighed the costs.