Scaling past Port Exhaustion: when 100k+ ports were not enough


One of my favorite technical projects involved overcoming a network constraint. The virtual machines (VMs) hosting the core services kept exhausting available ports. Once all ports were used up, new connections would fail, tanking our availability and reliability. Read on to learn how we overcame this issue and opened up opportunities to reduce costs by a third.

How Skype works


A lot of us use Skype daily but have no idea about how it works. Here is a brief description of the Skype framework. Skype employs a partially decentralized architecture - a mix of the peer-to-peer and  client-server architectures. The client-server system is used for authentication while the peer-to-peer system is used for IP telephony, relaying, … Continue reading How Skype works

Cloud Computing, the future of computing?


Cloud computing has been touted to be the future of computing. Trends suggest a move towards web-based software applications and services. The claim has been further strengthened by the emergence of companies offering cloud-based services to computer users. (e.g. Google Docs). The underlying principle of cloud computing is to have servers offering access to computing … Continue reading Cloud Computing, the future of computing?