I found the top two stories on scalebig last night to be interesting enough for me to dig a little deeper. The one which surprised me the most was William Vambenepe’s post about why he thinks that REST APIs doesn’t matter in context of cloud management. While REST might be ideal for many different things, [...]

Any blog which promotes the concept of cloud infrastructure would be doing injustice if it doesn’t provide references to implementations where it failed horribly. Here is an excellent post by Carlos Ble where he lists out all the problems he faced on Google App engine (python).  He lists 13 different limitations, most of which are [...]

I knew there was something called “OrientDB”, but didn’t know much about it until I went through these slides. Here is what I learned in one sentence. Its a easy to install NoSQL(schemaless) datastore, with absolutely no configuration required, supports ACID transactions, it can be used as a document store, a graph store and a [...]

Nate has a very good post about how Cassandra is different from a lot of other distributed data-stores. In particular he explains that every node in a Cassandra cluster are identical to every other node. After using cassandra and a few months I can tell you for a fact that its true. It does come [...]

Ever since I saw a demo of this tool, I’ve been on the edge, waiting for it to be opensourced so that I could use it.  The problem its trying to solve is a real pain-point which most webops folks would understand. Yesterday folks at stumbleupon finally opened it up. Its released under LGPLv3 license. [...]

James Golick makes a point which lot of people miss. He doesn’t believe auto-sharding features NoSQL provides is ready for full auto-pilot yet, and that good developers have to think about sharding as part of design architecture, regardless of what datastore you pick. If you take at face value the marketing materials of many NoSQL [...]

It’s totally worth it. Erlang (Erlang/OTP really, which is what most people mean when they say “Erlang has X”) does out of the box a lot of things we would have had to either build from scratch or attempt to piece together existing libraries to do. Its dynamic type system and pattern matching (ala Haskelland [...]

I had the opportunity to listen to Tony Tam at MongoSF talking about why and how they moved Wordnik from Mysql to MongoDB.  Both the Slides and the Video of the talk are attached to the end of this post. Wordnik is a new kind of “word” repository which is much more “current” than traditional [...]

I was at the MongoSF conference few weeks ago, and 10gen just hosted one at NY as well.I was taken aback by the simplicity and the hope MongoDB provides. I’ll have a more detailed post about what I think about it in a few days, but until then chew on these slides from bit.ly who [...]

Interesting news items for the week Subversion at Google Code is now replicated across multiple datacenter, is 3 times faster and uses Paxos algorithm to guarantee consistency VMware hired the Redis creator Amazon S3 Versioning is ready for production   Presentations,  talks and opinions  Pregel – Google’s Graph DB infrastructure The first public talk (as far [...]