“Share Nothing Architecture” redefined
Posted 6 April 2007 @ 12:27 pm by Nati Shalom"Share Nothing Architecture" is a common pattern for scaling out Web applications.
Generally speaking, the idea is to remove dependency between the scaling units, which in the case of a Web application means the Web Servers. Once these units become independent from each other, you can easily scale them just by adding more units. You can then load-balance the incoming requests among the different Web Servers.
Due to lack of alternatives, common practice for making Web Servers independent was to remove the shared-state from the servers into a shared file system, assuming that it would scale. Because of that, the thinking is that if your application is a service, and requires low-latency, this approach may not work.
Today we have better ways to remove data dependency, without putting the data into a shared file system — which may eventually become a bottleneck. We partition it and store it in-memory. Sounds familiar ?
So unlike the original definition, with the introduction of In-Memory-Data-Grids we can refer to "Shared Nothing Architecture" as architecture for scaling low-latency applications as well. Space-Based Architecture is one approach for implementing this in a high throughput/low latency environment.
May 1st, 2007 at 2:51 am
Extreme Transactions…
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April 23rd, 2009 at 7:12 am
[...] common pattern for keeping the web tier scalable is to use a Shared-Nothing Architecture, which basically means that the web tier will be stateless. This requires keeping the user session [...]
June 2nd, 2009 at 10:35 pm
[...] common pattern for keeping the web tier scalable is to use a Shared-Nothing Architecture, which basically means that the web tier will be stateless. This requires keeping the user session [...]