Home // CLOUD COMPUTING 2011, The Second International Conference on Cloud Computing, GRIDs, and Virtualization // View article

Designing an Elastic and Scalable Social Network Application

Authors:
Xavier De Coster
Matthieu Ghilain
Boris Mejías
Peter Van Roy

Keywords: Scalability; elasticity; cloud application; social network; Twitter; Beernet; Scalaris; key/value store

Abstract:
Central server-based social networks can suffer from overloading caused by social trends and make the service momentarily unavailable preventing users to access it when they most want it. Central server-based social networks are not adapted to face rapid growth of data or flash crowds. In this work we present a design for a scalable, elastic and secure Twitter-like social network application, called Bwitter, built on the top of a scalable transactional key/value datastore, such as Beernet or Scalaris. The application runs on a cloud infrastructure and is able to scale its resource usage up and down quickly to avoid overloading and resource wasting. We measure performance, scalability, and elasticity for our prototype and show it performs satisfactorily up to 18 nodes with realistic loads.

Pages: 92 to 97

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2011

Publication date: September 25, 2011

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4294

ISBN: 978-1-61208-153-3

Location: Rome, Italy

Dates: from September 25, 2011 to September 30, 2011