Pat Helland
Pat Helland is a really smart guy. He was Platform Architect at Microsoft (big-picture strategy), then spent a couple of years at Amazon.com helping the company with its service-oriented-architecture (SOA) strategy. In March 2007 Pat rejoined Microsoft to become a part of the company’s Developer Division.
He recently has worked on the projects like:
- Bing Infrastructure.
- Cosmos - a petabyte store (working towards being an exabyte store) which runs over tens of thousands of inexpensive computers.
- Autopilot.
There is a blog
Pat has authored a set of extremely interesting and thoughtful papers:
This is 10 page PDF on scalability in really large applications. Ideas from this article are explored further in Space Travel and Infinitely Scalable Solutions.
"Business realities force apologies. To cope with these difficult realities, we need code and, frequently, we need human beings to apologize. It is essential that businesses have both code and people to manage these apologies."
These papers help to shape understanding and body of knowledge in building massively scalable systems. It's strong recommendation to read these if you are studying CQRS and xLim or simply building solution for the cloud computing environment.