O'Reilly News & Commentary

Four short links: 16 October 2009 - Audio Geotagging, SF Open Data Stories, Wave Use Cases, Hadooped Genomes

By Nat Torkington
October 16, 2009

Wiimote Audio Geotagging -- match audio with the map movement and annotations made with an IR pen and a Wiimote. Very cool! (and from New Zealand) San Francisco: Open For Data -- Two months after it launched, the project is already reaping rewards from San Francisco's huge community of programmers. Applications using the data include Routesy, which offers directions...

Four short links: 8 October 2009 - DIY Baby Rocker, Unix Systems Glory, Encrypting Ephemera, and Explaining Creative Joy

By Nat Torkington
October 8, 2009

Linux Baby Rocker -- Check out this inventive use of a CD drive and the eject command, combined to create an automatic baby rocker. (via Hacker News) This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Four short links: 22 September 2009 - Cities, How Things Work, Stylish Google, EC2 Numbers

By Nat Torkington
September 22, 2009

The City is a Battlesuit for Surviving the Future (IO9) -- a great essay by Matt Jones, based on his talk at Webstock this year. Urban design is how we created alternate realities before we had iPhones, and the new technology lets us choose which science fiction future we want to inhabit. We are now a predominantly urban species, with over 50% of humanity living in a city. The overwhelming majority of these are not old post-industrial world cities such as London or New York, but large chaotic sprawls of the industrialising world such as the "maximum cities" of Mumbai or Guangzhou. Here the infrastructures are layered, ad-hoc, adaptive and personal - people there really are walking architecture, as Archigram said. Hacking post-industrial cities is becoming a necessity also.

A Quick Look at Amazon CloudWatch, Load Balancing, and Auto-Scaling

By George Reese
June 2, 2009

Amazon recently made available to the public three new services that will have a huge impact on the way people architect systems to be deployed in the Amazon cloud. I have put together my first look thoughts on these new offerings. . All three pieces significantly enhance what you can do with an infrastructure deployed in AWS, but they have their limitations.

MySQL 2009 conference wrap-up: news flash about Flash and other notes from the experts

By Andy Oram
April 24, 2009

MySQL conference wrap-up: Flash, cloud computing, managing large installations, the value of community, and how to fumble your way to winning the presidency.

[AWS:EC2] EC2 Reserved Instances Launched In EU Data Center

By M. David Peterson
April 18, 2009

As per a recent post to the EC2 forums, there's now support for reserved instances inside the EC2 EU Data Center.

Using the Cloud for Disaster Recovery

By George Reese
April 13, 2009

Few companies have a solid disaster recovery plan and fewer companies actually verify their DR plans are working. One of the often missed benefits of cloud computing is that it makes rapid disaster recovery with minimal data loss extremely cost effective and enables the automation of those processes that can be tested often using automated tools.

Open Cloud Manifesto: about openness, standards, and the vitality of SMTP

By Andy Oram
March 30, 2009

Thanks to George Reese, I learned about the bruhaha over an Open Cloud Manifesto. Let's put the debate in the context of some basic and perennial issues about openness and standards.

The Weakness of Commodity Server to Cloud Server Cost Comparisons

By George Reese
March 20, 2009

Though the conventional wisdom on the Internet is that the economic benefits of cloud computing fail for applications with steady usage needs, the reality is that the commodity-server to cloud-server comparisons on which this wisdom is based are flawed. The reality is that the cloud often provides compelling economic benefits even when you have an application with consistent resource demands.

AWS:EC2 Introduces Reserved Instances; Massive Potential Cost Reduction

By M. David Peterson
March 13, 2009

What's the best way to jump start a stalling economy? Provide reasons for people to spend money by reducing costs for goods they're already paying for, freeing up capital to be invested into places they otherwise would not be invested into. Enter Amazon Web Services and the introduction of EC2 Reserved Instances.

Blame the Credit Card Franchise: Criminals on Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)

By Nitesh Dhanjani
March 11, 2009

Amazon EC2 is an extraordinarily powerful infrastructure available to anyone with a stolen credit card. Even if someone is able to use the EC2 platform for a few hours with a stolen credit card, he or she will be able to initiate a vicious cycle that may become impossible to halt.

PCI in the Cloud

By George Reese
February 26, 2009

Compliance is the most significant issue confronting organizations looking at a move into the cloud. Here are a number of recommended architectures that should provide PCI compliance for pure-cloud infrastructures.

Why the AWS Console is Good for Cloud Tool Vendors

By George Reese
January 9, 2009

The release of the Amazon Web Services console has had a number of people predicting doom for cloud tools providers. On the contrary, by removing a barrier to experimentation that has kept people out of the cloud, the Amazon Web Services console should bring more people in the cloud and benefit tools providers whose value propositions are beyond Amazon's core value proposition.

Microsoft's Cloud Tax

By George Reese
December 25, 2008

The importance of the differences among web application platforms like .NET, JSP, PHP, etc. drops dramatically under the cloud computing paradigm. Which architecture you choose really comes down to one question: what kind of programming and support resources do you have? If the answer is "Microsoft technologies", however, you should be aware of the Microsoft cloud tax.

How I Ended Up in the Cloud

By George Reese
December 13, 2008

Like most of us, I have been in the cloud longer than I have thought about being "in the cloud". But it took the need for a significant capital investment in hardware to drive Valtira into cloud computing using Amazon Web Services like Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3. Our journey into the cloud began with a new product offering and an attempt to avoiding shelling out huge up-front cash on hardware. Today, we have a complex infrastructure that saves us money over other options and provides greater flexibility.

EUC2?

By M. David Peterson
December 10, 2008

Proving yet again that attempting to boil the ocean results in nothing more than a few dead fish, Amazon Web Services continues its "one customer at a time" assault on the utility computing marketplace, this go round bringing EC2 a little closer to home for customers based in Europe.

On Why I Don't Like Auto-Scaling in the Cloud

By George Reese
December 7, 2008

Cloud environments like Amazon EC2 have the ability to dynamically add and remove capacity based on your actual demand. Some tools extend this capability into auto-scaling. Auto-scaling, however, can be dangerous and often serves as a crutch for poor capacity planning.

Key Security Issues for the Amazon Cloud

By George Reese
December 1, 2008

This follow-on article to the Twenty Rules for Amazon Cloud Security examines six real security concerns that gave rise to the 20 rules.

Increasing Availability in the Amazon Cloud

By George Reese
November 10, 2008

If you have done any experimentation in the cloud, you have likely realized that virtual server instances in the Amazon cloud are much less reliable than their real world counterparts. How do you compare availability in the cloud to a physical infrastructure and leverage the cloud to increase overall availability?

ECWin2k8?

By M. David Peterson
October 1, 2008

In a surprise announcement just a few moments ago, Jeff Barr, Amazon Web Services lead technical evangelist announced they would now be supporting Windows on EC2. This is a /HUGE/ deal, especially when you consider the fact that Microsoft is rumored to be preparing a competitor to EC2, something they will supposedly be announcing at the PDC in November.

AWS Persistent Storage: Coming Soon To An EC2 Instance Near You?

By M. David Peterson
August 5, 2008

This last April Amazon Web Services let out some slack on the leashes of a top secret project they'd been working only to pull back that slack at the last second, ripping from the clutches of 1000's upon 1000's of adoring fans the possibility of gaining even the slightest peek at what was under the covers anytime in the near-term future. That top secret project was a persistent storage solution that many folks have criticized as the Achilles heel of Amazon Web Services EC2 cloud computing platform since it public beta launch in August of 2006. Today, it seems, that a bit more slack has been released, but as far as I can tell, this time there's no pulling back. Are you ready?

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