Frozen Rails Talk Proposal Template (http://2012.frozenrails.eu/)

speaker.md

Srdan Kvrgic

Contact details

• Email: [email protected]
• Twitter: @srdan
• Website or Blog: http://blog.burtcorp.com/tagged/engineering
• Company: Burt

Speaker bio

Pressing run on the ZX Spectrum at the age of 6 led inevitably to the MSc in Computer Engineering and a position as the backend-architect at a startup that scaled from a handful of users to tens of millions within a couple of years.

Currently working at Burt, developing a multi-billion request ad-tracking service using JRuby. Hey, it's only fun if it's exponential.

talk.md

Idempotence as the holy grail of scaling

• Desired talk duration: 45 minutes

Abstract

One of the biggest challenges when handling big data is making sure your system is coherent after an unexpected crash or machine failure. Designing your system for idempotency will make sure you can reprocess parts of your data to fill in the gaps without accidentally affecting the good data.

Once you've got the idempotency down, you are free to venture boldly into a veritable Narnia of scaling solutions.[*]

This talk will describe the problem and offer a couple of solutions by looking at some real-life implementations.

[*] But.. you know. Warmer. And with less .. lions. I guess.