the reflexions insider

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 [...]

Building applications with reusable, modular components is kind of the holy grail of software development. To be conservative let’s call it a general aspiration, and if nothing else a guiding principle of Good Design. We’ve been hearing about it since the seventies and several iterations later (OO design, Java/Struts, and more recently, the growing number of web frameworks such as RoR, CakePHP, Zend, etc.) we’re just starting to feel the impact on large scale distributed applications that are becoming the hallmark of this strange collective trip that is the early 21st century landscape of social computing.

While we like to think of ourselves as a pretty savvy bunch, we at Reflexions have been admittedly a little slow in jumping on the framework bandwagon over the last few years. Maybe it’s the control-freak mindset that comes with building custom apps, or maybe we just haven’t found the right fit. Whatever the reason, we’ve finally started to embrace the framework philosophy by doing what any other group of control freaks would do: we’ve built our own. More on that in a future post.

What’s struck me about building a framework is that in doing so one engages in the zen-like exercise of modeling one’s own notions of how applications exist and interact with their underlying components. [...]