Summary from James’ keynote talk at Velocity 2010 Pace of Innovation – Datacenter pace of innovation is increasing.  The high focus on infrastructure innovation is driving down the cost, increasing reliability and reducing resource consumption which ultimate drives down cost. Where does the money go ? 54% on servers, 8% on networking, 21% on power [...]

Yesterday Google formally announced Google Storage to a few (5000?) of us at Google I/O. Here is the gist of this as I see it from the various discussions/talks I attended. To begin with, I have to point out that there is almost nothing new in what Google has proposed to provide. Amazon has been [...]

Ted Dziuba has a post about “I can’t wait for NoSQL to Die”. The basic argument he makes is that one has to be at the size Google is to really benefit from NoSQL. I think he is missing the point. Here are my observations. This is similar to the argument the traditional DB vendors [...]

We discussed Brewer’s Theorm a few days ago and how its challenging to obtain Consistency, Availability and Partition tolerance in any distributed system. We also discussed that many of the distributed datastores allow CAP to be tweaked to attain certain operational goals. Amazon SimpleDB, which was released as an “Eventually Consistent” datastore,  today launched a [...]

If you missed the AWS S3 versioning webcast, I have a copy of the video here. And here are the highlights.. You can enable and disable this at the bucket level They don’t think there is a performance penalty of turning versioning (but it was kind of obvious S3 would be doing slightly extra work [...]

One of the problem with Amazon’s S3 was the inability to take a “snapshot” of the state of S3 at any given moment. This is one of the most important DR (disaster recovery) steps of any major upgrade which could potentially corrupt data during a release. Until now the applications using S3 would have had [...]

Networking devices on the edges have become smarter over time. So have the firewalls and switches used internally within the networks. Whether we like it or not, web applications over time have grown to depend on them. Its impossible to build a flawless product because of which its standard practice to disable all unused services [...]

Windows Azure is an application platform provided by Microsoft to allow others to run applications on Microsoft’s “cloud” infrastructure. Its finally open for business (as of Feb 1, 2010). Below are some links about Azure for those who are still catching up. Wikipedia: Windows Azure has three core components: Compute, Storage and Fabric. As the [...]

While “private clouds may not be the future” they are definitely needed today. Here are some of the top issues bothering some organizations which have been thinking about going into the cloud. Some of issues were based on Craig Bolding’s talk on “Guide to cloud security”. Unlike your own data center, you will never know [...]

If you don’t like EC2 you have an option to move your app to a new vendor. But if you don’t like GAE  (Google app engine) there aren’t any solutions which can replace GAE easily. AppScale might change that. AppScale is an open-source implementation of the Google AppEngine (GAE) cloud computing interface from the RACELab [...]