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 on [...]

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 names [...]

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 at UC [...]

James Hamilton is one of the leaders in this industry and has written a very thought provoking post about private clouds not being the future. This is what he said about private clouds when compared to existing not-cloud solutions.

A fix, Not the future (reference to an InformationWeek post)
Runs at lower utilization levels
Consumes more [...]

My last post was about my struggle to find a good distributed ESB/Service-discovery solution built over open source tools which was simple to use and maintain. Thanks to reader comments (Dan especially) and some other email exchanges, it seems like building a custom solution is unavoidable if I really want to keep things simple.
Dan suggested [...]