Web Services

Amazon Dynamo paper

Application Software |  Architecture |  General |  Web Services · 09/07/2010

Werner 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!

» Read more: Amazon Dynamo paper

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Useful Charting and Visualization Tools

.NET |  API |  Web Services · 09/04/2010

Here are a few useful charting tools for the .NET platform and one statistical analysis package available on Linux.

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CloudCamp Seattle

Web Services · 02/04/2010

CloudCamp 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.

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SAWSUG 2/2/2010

Web Services · 02/03/2010

Yesterday’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!

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