Mike Malone, SimpleGeo

Mike Malone is an infrastructure engineer at SimpleGeo where he works on building and integrating scalable systems that power the company’s location platform. Since joining SimpleGeo, Mike has been working to ensure operational continuity in the face of rapid growth, partial system failures, and traffic bursts. Recently, he's been working on building an efficient multi-dimensional complex query overlay on top of an eventually consistent distributed hash table. Before joining SimpleGeo, Mike helped build the microblogging web site Pownce, where he learned a lot about the technical and social difficulties of scaling an online community. After Pownce’s acquisition by Six Apart in 2008, Mike worked on the TypePad platform team, where he gained a great deal of experience building RESTful web services. In his spare time Mike enjoys tinkering with new technologies. When he’s not on the computer, you can probably find him hanging out with his girlfriend, Katie, and their friends at a good bar.

Software Passion: Building large scale distributed systems.

Links:
Twitter: @mjmalone
Blog: http://immike.net/

Presentation: "SimpleGeo: Staying Agile at Scale"

Track: Architecture Case Studies I

Time: Wednesday 10:35 - 11:35

Location: Metropolitan Ballroom II & III

Abstract: 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.