In a blog post today Netflix shared with their community the back-end of how things operate as well as sharing their reasoning behind it.
Being in the business of developing scaleable web apps I always appreciate things like this a lot since I want to learn from the best:
As Netflix moved into the cloud, we needed to find the appropriate mechanisms to persist and query data within our highly distributed infrastructure.
Our goal is to build fast, fault tolerant systems at Internet scale. We realized that in order to achieve this goal, we needed to move beyond the constraints of the traditional relational model. In the distributed world governed by Eric Brewer’s CAP theorem , high availability (a.k.a. better customer experience) usually trumps strong consistency.
There is little room for vertical scalability or single points of failure. And while it is not easy to re-architect your systems to not run join queries, or not rely on read-after-write consistency (hey, just cache the value in your app!), we have found ourselves braving the new frontier of NoSQL distributed databases.
Read the full article here for more a more in-depth overview.
Kevin says
As much as I love SQL, I realize some of its faults…just out of curiosity, do you think WordPress could ever adopt NoSQL? (I don’t even know if I phrased that right…but I think you know what I mean.)
John Saddington says
probably not……. but… people have installed wordpress on .net and stuff. so, if you’re clever enough, you can do whatever you want……!