scale

A short film in which friends build the first true-to-scale model of the solar system, with full planetary orbits, on a Nevada dry lakebed. It conveys the real distances and sizes involved.

Bobby McFerrin uses audience participation at a World Science Festival event to demonstrate how instinctively people follow the pentatonic scale.

James Hamilton, AWS VP and distinguished engineer, gives an insider view of the innovations behind the AWS cloud at re:Invent 2014. He covers custom hardware, networking, regions and availability zones, and infrastructure at scale.

John Graham-Cumming of Cloudflare talks at dotScale 2015 about handling roughly 10 trillion log lines a month. The talk touches on Cloudflare's hardware, its logging stack and its use of Lua in Nginx.

A PyData London 2018 talk on how JPMorgan scaled its Athena Python platform over ten years to about 35 million lines of code and thousands of developers. It covers infrastructure, tooling and culture for analytics and visualization at that scale.

An AWS re:Invent 2018 session on how DynamoDB was built as a hyper-scale NoSQL database. It discloses underpinnings of the service and how it is run for over 100,000 customers.

Hyrum Wright shares lessons from five years of mass code migrations in Google's huge C++ codebase. He covers why to migrate, how hard it really is, and how Google updates core libraries and their users continually.

A satirical animated dialogue in which a naive developer insists MongoDB is web scale while a database expert mocks him. It parodies the NoSQL versus relational debate.

Dropbox engineer Kevin Modzelewski gives a Stanford colloquium on Dropbox's history and the technical problems it faced scaling, including detailed database schema decisions.

Joe Armstrong's Strange Loop 2013 talk on building large scalable systems from small isolated parallel components. It covers detecting and correcting errors at run time, changing code while it runs, and how Erlang embodies these principles.

A cappella parody song by The Richter Scales, set to Billy Joel's 'We Didn't Start the Fire', lampooning the Web 2.0 startup bubble. It won a Webby for viral video in 2007.

Google engineers describe Google's internal build system, a unified, language-agnostic system used across the company. It was presented as a 2012 NYC tech talk.

SpaceX engineers present at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference on a multi-physics code that simulates the full-scale Raptor methane engine. It covers GPU-based turbulent combustion modeling with adaptive grids and wavelet compression.

Bryan Cantrill's Scale By The Bay 2019 talk on software after Moore's Law. He covers the end of easy scaling and the move toward specialized, emerging architectures.

A Foresight Institute workshop video with two talks: Shawn Douglas on nanoscale instruments for visualizing small proteins, and Bret Victor on Dynamicland. Victor's part shows biomolecular design built in his Realtalk system with physical objects.

Psychologist Robert Epstein presents a Stanford EE380 colloquium on how internet algorithms such as search rankings can manipulate opinions, purchases and votes at massive scale. He also describes a new monitoring system for tracking such influence.

A dotScale 2014 talk by Robert Kennedy, a former healthcare.gov SRE who later worked at Google, about the engineering effort to rescue the troubled site. It explains the technical and organizational problems behind the failed launch.

An F8 2015 talk touring the tool-chain Facebook uses to let thousands of engineers build mobile apps, including its move to Mercurial, an Atom-based IDE and continuous integration.

Anthony Marcar describes lessons from three years of using Clojure at WalmartLabs, including scaling a team and a large multi-project codebase in an enterprise setting.

Bryan Cantrill argues that programming languages and platforms reflect core values, and compares languages through that lens, with Rust as a main example. He draws on his experience with Solaris, DTrace and ZFS.

Luis von Ahn, creator of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, explains how small contributions from many people online can digitize books. He then introduces Duolingo as a way to translate the web while people learn languages.

AWS's short promo for Snowmobile, a 45-foot shipping container pulled by a semi truck that moves up to 100PB of data to AWS.

A Ray Summit 2022 keynote fireside chat between OpenAI's Greg Brockman and Anyscale's Robert Nishihara. They discuss how OpenAI's training infrastructure evolved and its use of Ray.

A visual scale comparison of stars and cosmic objects, from planets up to some of the largest known stars, set to music. It is meant to convey the vastness of the universe.

Jeff Dean of Google describes his experiences building Google's systems and how its infrastructure evolved over time. The Stanford talk covers search, scaling tipping points and lessons from building large-scale software.

The Eames Office's 1977 film Powers of Ten starts at a picnic in Chicago and zooms out by a factor of ten every ten seconds to the edge of the universe. It then zooms inward to a proton in a carbon atom.

Numberphile explains the long and short scales for naming large numbers, covering millions, billions, trillions, milliards and the Greek myriad, with James Grime and Tony Padilla.

Matt Ranney of Uber talks at GOTO Chicago 2016 about what Uber learned from growing past 1,000 production microservices. He covers regrets, sprawl and organizational effects.

Rick Reed of WhatsApp speaks at MeetBSD about running a messaging service on FreeBSD and Erlang at huge scale. He covers the stack, tuning and the challenges of millions of connections per host.

A PyCon 2012 talk by early YouTube engineer Mike Solomon on how YouTube scaled its architecture, which is mostly Python.

A Google Tech Talk by Raymond Blum on how Google backs up massive amounts of data such as Gmail and Picasa. It covers scaling challenges, failure types, and approaches that did not work, including tape.

CGP Grey explains the elegant ratio of A4 and the metric paper sizes, then zooms out across scales from the Planck length to the observable universe.

A recording of Richard Feynman's talk on the possibilities of manipulating matter at very small scales, widely seen as an early vision of nanotechnology. This is a later version of his 1959 "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" lecture.

Rick Reed of WhatsApp explains at Erlang Factory 2014 how the service scaled to billions of messages with a very small engineering team. He covers the FreeBSD and Erlang stack, Mnesia usage, server counts and bottleneck work.

A 2007 Google Tech Talk in which Cliff Click of Azul Systems presents a lock-free concurrent hash table that scales to 768 CPUs. He explains why it is correct by reasoning in a different way than usual happens-before and memory-order arguments.

James Hamilton's Tuesday Night Live keynote at AWS re:Invent 2016, touring AWS infrastructure at scale including networking, power and custom silicon. It also features NASA JPL's Tom Soderstrom.

Martin Kleppmann's Strange Loop talk on database transactions, covering why they were dropped by NoSQL, their reputation for being slow, and newer algorithms that make serializable transactions perform and scale. It touches on consistency, linearizability and the CAP theorem.

An 8-minute explainer on the Lightning Network and how it relates to Segwit, Bitcoin and Litecoin. It covers how off-chain payment channels route payments to scale blockchain transactions.

Cuong Do of YouTube describes how a handful of engineers scaled the site, covering hardware, software and database scalability challenges during its rapid growth. The talk was given at the 2007 Seattle Conference on Scalability.

Google's Amin Vahdat gives the ONS 2015 keynote on Google's datacenter networking, including its custom hardware, software-defined networking and very high bisection bandwidth.