Filed under , cloud computing, google, semantic web, web development by dan leslie | 0 comments
Cloud computing is all the rage these days. Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures gave an interesting talk at the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC recently which covered some of the implications of cloud computing. At the Web 3.0 Conference there was a lively discussion about some of the more technical issues surrounding cloud computing, software as a service, and web architectures in general. Here are some of the points that were made:
A general rule of building out any system that needs to scale is to look at every layer in your system as a caching opportunity to minimize processing.
Start with clusterable technologies wherever possible.
The cloud has made “spinning up” instances of your application just an API call away. It’s extremely flexible and basically means you’ll (almost) never have to think about hardware again.
Amazon AWS is the leading cloud solution right now and is extremely flexible because it provides access to the HTTP layer. It’s becoming the Wal-Mart of cloud solutions and it’s price-optimized for CPU cycles.
IBM could become a major player in cloud computing over the next 2-10 years because of their history of mainframe architecture. The cloud is [...]
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Filed under cloud computing by dan leslie | 0 comments
At sometime just before 12PM EDT the Amazon Simple Storage Service (or “S3″ for short) began to fail, causing major disruptions among applications that rely on the service for cheap and virtually unlimited storage. Amazon’s string of status updates throughout the day barely masks the complete-meltdown nature of the incident. Five hours later the service was restored.
For the uninitiated, S3 is a central part of Amazon’s family of service-based solutions and has been regarded as one of the most useful and reliable of the bunch. In short: it means that developers can offload storage of large or oft-requested files to a trusted third party without having to worry about costly bandwidth, hardware, and sys admins, and far more cheaply than content delivery networks (”CDN’s”) like Akamai. While Amazon charges based on usage of the service, stories abound with companies that save hundreds or thousands of dollars a month by shifting storage to S3.
Analysts have largely responded positively to the service, which originally grew out of Amazon’s internal infrastructure efforts and has come to symbolize the company as a major player in the emerging software-as-a-service landscape of so-called “utility computing.”
What’s noteworthy about this event is twofold: 1) the [...]
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