Google recently announced its new search feature called “Instant”. From early reports about the new service, there was a lot of back-end work that needed to take place. In fact, it sounded like deficiencies in the speed at which Google was able to update its index was a motivating factor. The Register is points to Google’s “caffene” release earlier this year as departure from its reliance on MapReduce in favor of improvements to BigTable. The real story here is the much needed reimplementation of the Google File System.
Archive for 2010
Amazon Dynamo paper
Application Software | Architecture | General | Web Services · 09/07/2010Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon.com, posted a paper on Amazon’s internal called “Dynamo” about two year ago that was selected to be presented at the 21st ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. Dynamo is Amazon’s internal cluster software platform. It is really their operating system since they add “hot swappable” commodity hardware to the system in plug-and-play fashion as needed.
I know I’m late to finding this particular paper since it was first published about two years ago. Better late than never!
HTC HD2 is not the best, but tethering rocks
General | None of the above · 09/05/2010I’ve got a laundry list of issues with my HTC HD2 (Twitter OAuth fix is a no-show so far, Windows Phone random reboots, no Windows Phone 7 planned, slowest music player ever — that’s just getting started) but the one bright spot is the ability to tether over a USB connection to T-Mobile’s 3G network. I just ran a speed test and here are the results: 3.82 MB/s download and 0.63 MB/s upstream. Sure beats 56K!
Useful Charting and Visualization Tools
.NET | API | Web Services · 09/04/2010Here are a few useful charting tools for the .NET platform and one statistical analysis package available on Linux.
MapReduce Options for .NET
API · 02/07/2010There are some questions about how the recent patent award for MapReduce to Google will impact existing projects.
CloudCamp Seattle
Web Services · 02/04/2010CloudCamp was fun, my first “unconference”. Vendors presented their services in 5 minutes or less, here were some.
- WebServius – 3rd party billing for your web service. Handles things like signup, metering, api key gen, quotas & analytics.
- DynInc – Who knew DNS could be so cool? Regional DNS routing, global traffic management, geo targeting traffic, load balancing. This is what sys admins do when they go to heaven.
- Twilio – Phone API (Press 1 for “Services”, Press 2 for “Billing”). I couldn’t remember their name for the longest time until last night when they were mentioned by the speaker from WebServius. Didn’t actually present.
SAWSUG 2/2/2010
Web Services · 02/03/2010Yesterday’s SAWSUG meeting was held in the soon-to-be old Amazon building on Beacon Hill. Saw great presentations by
- AWS feature rollout since November (A December to remember)
- AWS DB offering overview (EC2 AMIs, RDS and SimpleDB). Don’t forget the 4 hour maintenance window! Rollout of 5.1.4.2 is coming soon.
- Senior VP Engineering Bob Wise from nuTsie.com (aka Melodeo)
- OpsCode‘s CTO Adam Jacob and VP Engineering Christopher Brown.
Take aways:
- Amazon’s 8th floor presentation room had some rockin’ views of the sound!
- Both presentations hinted that small AWS instances really don’t provide the best bang for your buck. Medium (High CPU) and Large sizes tend to provide better performance.
- Didn’t know that Windows 2008 R2 was now available on AWS (haven’t checked since December).
- CIDR addresses should be “/32″ unless you know what you’re doing!
- HIPPA compliance is at the App level, SAS 70 is at the physical layer.
- Locking your AWS instances can prevent accidental/unintentional shutdowns.
- memcached, memcached, memcached.
- Ecualyptus: Your own private Idaho (in the cloud) is AWS API compatible!
Launching new site
General · 01/28/2010Welcome to the recently redesigned ninesys.com. It’s been a few years so I thought I would refresh the look and roll out a few more pages and functionality.