The complete announcement is here, but here are the changes for the java SDK. The two big changes I liked is the fact that there is now an “always on” feature, and “tasks” feature has graduated out of beta/testing. The Always On feature allows applications to pay and keep 3 instances of their application always [...]

The “Google instant” wasn’t a ground breaking idea by itself. We have all been using various forms of auto-completes for a while now. What makes it stand out is that unlike all the previous kinds of auto-completes, this one is able to search the entire web archive, at an amazing speed and still be able [...]

From Urs’ talk at the velocity2010 conference [ More info : Google, datacenterknowledge ] Average web page – 320kb, 44 resources, 7 dns lookups, doesn’t compress 3rd of its content Aiming for 100ms page load times for chrome Chrome: HTML5, V8 JS engine, DNS prefetching, VP8 codec, opensource, spurs competition TCP improvements Fast start (higher [...]

MapReduce, Bigtable and Pregel have their origins in Google and they all deal with “large systems”. But all of them may be dwarfed in size and complexity by a new project Google is working on, which was mentioned briefly (may be un-intentionally) at an event last year. Instead of caching data closer to user, it [...]

Standard DNS protocol allows DNS servers to respond with multiple addresses in the replies for simple DNS lookup queries. This, and the way that the order of records is changed in every reply is collectively known as the “Round Robin DNS” technique to load balance across a set of servers. Though a lot of organizations [...]

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 [...]

After filing in 2004, google finally got its patent on “System and method for efficient large-scale data processing”  approved  yesterday. Gigaom pointed out that if Google really wants to enforce it, it would have to go after many different vendors who are implementing “mapreduce” in some form in their applications and databases. Google’s intentions of [...]

Last week I spent a few hours building a search engine testing tool called “BlackboxSET”. The purpose of the tool was to allow users to see search results from three different search providers and vote for the best set of results without knowing the source of the results. The hope was that the search engine [...]

For the last couple of weekends I’ve been playing with Google App Engine, (Java edition) and was pleasantly surprised at the direction it has taken. I was also fortunate enough to see some Google Engineers talk on this subject at Google I/O which helped me a lot to compile all this information. But before I [...]