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Last year at VMware 2008 conference they discussed something called vCloud . Before VMware 2009, they will be announcing external clouds providers around that platform which allow internal clouds to extend their infrastructure to external clouds. What VMware is trying to do is allow organizations to build cloud networks with the possibility of moving few services/components to external clouds. To make this seamless the VMware vSphere tool which currently allows internal cloud management will be enhanced to allow it to manage instances on the external cloud almost as if it was part of the internal cloud. In fact if the rumors are true, they will even support vMotion across to external cloud providers (restrictions apply). VMware is getting on the cloud bandwagon in a big way… just take a look at the number of sessions they have mentioning cloud.

Alex Barrera has a very interesting post about how frustrating it is to figure out that you have a problem and how much trouble it is to fix it after the product is live. I am there, I am suffering the redesign phase (twice now). It’s hard, it’s lonely, it’s discouraging and frustrating, but it needs to be done. I just wrote this post so that outsiders can get a glimpse of what is it to be there and how it affects the whole company, not just the tech department. Scalability problems aren’t something you can discard as being ONLY technical, it’s roots might be technical but its effects will shake the whole company. The post actually reminded me of this post by Marton Trencseni which talks about the phases of improvement in scalability architecture a product goes through and digs a little deeper into what could have prevented it. For startups or for companies which are just prototyping new ideas, their goals can sometimes be just to “test the waters”, and the pr

  Products/Ideas redis - http://code.google.com/p/redis/ : Redis is a key-value database. It is similar to memcached but the dataset is not volatile, and values can be strings, exactly like in memcached, but also lists and sets with atomic operations to push/pop elements. HBase - http://hadoop.apache.org/hbase/ : HBase is the Hadoop database. Its an open-source, distributed, column-oriented store modeled after the Google paper, Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data by Chang et al. Just as Bigtable leverages the distributed data storage provided by the Google File System, HBase provides Bigtable-like capabilities on top of Hadoop. Sherpa - http://research.yahoo.com/node/2139 BigTable - http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable-osdi06.pdf voldemort - It is basically just a big, distributed, persistent, fault-tolerant hash table. For applications that can use an O/R mapper like active-record or hibernate this will provide horizontal scalabi

While rest of the world is busy with Microsoft and Google, Yahoo might be preparing to launch MObStor which they tout as the “Unstructured Storage for the Internet”. While comparing MObStor to the various Cloud computing storage solutions already available, Navneet Joneja, Sr. Product Manager, mentions Facebook’s Haystack to describe MObStor’s architectural design. He also points out that though Facebook’s Haystack was optimized to store photographs, MObStor was optimized for diverse set of use cases. Its a REST based, browser-accessible API with simple security model, and content-agnostic storage features. The focus of this service seems to be fast, reliable, secure storage with the option of allowing customers to layer additional services on top of the core service. It claims it would be optimized for high performance and high availability (who doesn’t). Here is more from the Yahoo Developer Network Blog Facebook's Haystack is based on commodity storage.

Jonathan Ellis ’ started up a storm when he posted an entry about CouchDB about 6 months ago. He questioned some of CouchDB’s claims and made an attempt to warn users who don’t understand practical issues around CoughDB very well. After reading his post and some comments, it looked like he was specifically concerned about CouchDB’s ability to distribute/scale a growing database automatically. Its a good read if you are curious. He has stopped accepting comments on his blog, but that shouldn’t stop you from commenting here. As Jan pointed out in the comments Jonathan is assuming “distributed” means “auto-scaling” which is not true. -- links from the blog.. Cassandra   dynomite   Sawzall   Pig

  Some notes from a talk I was at. Didn’t get time to write it in detail. But hey, something is better than nothing… right ? Design for failure         - handle failure             - use elastic ip addresses             - use multiple amazon ec2 availability zones             - create mutliple database slaves across multiple zones             - use real-time monitoring (amazon cloudwatch)             - use amazon EBS for persistent file system                 - snapshot database to s3 (from ebs)    Loose coupling sets you free         - independent components         - design everything as a blackbox         - de-coupling for hybrid models         - loadbalance-clusters         - use SQS as buffers to queue messages. Allows elasticity    Design for dynamism         - build for changes in infrastructure              - Don't assume health of fixed location of components             - Use designs that are resil

Small organizations often keep a very active online presence . For them, any news is good news. Larger organizations however try to be opposite of that and control information. What I’ve been trying to understand is how in spite of all that companies like Google and Microsoft still manage to have a huge online presence. No.Of.TwitterAccounts= (Size.Of.Company)^(1/2)  ? For example today, Google announced a list of all of its Twitter accounts in one page.  How do they do it ? General twitter.com/Google - our central account twitter.com/Blogger - for Blogger fans twitter.com/GoogleCalendar - user tips & updates twitter.com/GoogleImages - news, tips, tricks on our visual image search twitter.com/GoogleNews - latest headlines via Google News twitter.com/GoogleReader - from our feed reader team twitter.com/iGoogle - news & notes from Google's personalized homepage twitter.com/GoogleStudents - news of interest to students using Google

Novaram and PC World did a cell phone service provider test across the nation to compare the three big cell giants.  I was very shocked and surprised at how crappy the AT&T; wireless network’s reliability is in the city I live.  No wonder people have been constantly complaining about service problems. I wish Apple had gone with Verizon for iPhone… I’ve used verizon for years (before I switched to AT&T;) and was pretty happy with them.