Grid
Update 2: Summize Computes Computing Resources for a Startup. Lots of nice graphs showing Amazon is hard to beat for small machines and become less cost efficient for well used larger machines. Long term storage costs may eat your saving away. And out of cloud bandwidth costs are high. Update:
Strategy
A very entertaining and somewhat educational article on IBM Poopheads say LAMP Users Need to "grow up". The physical three tier architecture turns out to be the root of all evil and shared nothing architectures brings simplicity and light. In the comments Simon Willison makes an insightful comment
Strategy
Release It! author Michael Nygard tells a tale of two web sites, both brought low by unexpectedly huge unbounded results sets that slowed down their sites to the speed of a Christmas checkout line. I've committed this error more than a few times. During testing the results sets
Strategy
This is a question asked on the ycombinator list and there are some good responses. I gave a quick response, but I particularly like neilk's knock out of the park insightful answer: Read Cal Henderson's book. (I'd add in Theo's book and
AWS
Not surprisingly opinions on SimpleDB vary from it sucks, don't take my database, to it will change the world, who needs a database anyway? From a quick survey of the blogosphere, here's where SimpleDB stands at the moment: SimpleDB Cons No SLA. We don't
look-mom-no-firewalls
On the blogs.technet.com article on microsoft.com's infrastructure: The article reads like a blatant ad for it's own products, and is light on the technical side. The juicy bits are here, so you know what the fuss is about: * Cytrix Netscaler (= loadbalancer with various
Update 3: InfoQ's Big Architecture Up Front - A Case of Premature Scalaculation? twines several different threads on the topic together into a fine noose. Update 2: Kevin says the biggest problems he sees with startups is they need to scale their backend (no, the other one). Update:
Oracle
People sometimes wonder why Oracle isn't mentioned on this site more. Maybe it will now as Michael Nygard reports Oracle 11g now does read/write splitting with their Active Data Guard product. Average replication latency was 1 second and it's accomplished with standard Oracle JDBC drivers.
Product
Update: Facebook pulls a Microsoft and embraces and extends by opening their platform to other social sites like Bebo. Very smart and unexpected. More info at Facebook to let other sites access platform code. This month's regular Facebook Meetup was held at Google and the topic of the
Product
Tugela Cache is a cache system like memecached, but instead of storing data just in RAM, it stores data in the file system using a b-tree. You trade latency in order to have a very large cache. It's useful for sites that have caching requirements that exceed their
Strategy
A lot of apps need to map IP addresses to locations. Jeremy Cole in On efficiently geo-referencing IPs with MaxMind GeoIP and MySQL GIS succinctly explains the many uses for such a feature: Geo-referencing IPs is, in a nutshell, converting an IP address, perhaps from an incoming web visitor, a
Strategy
Now that the internet has become defined as a mashup over a collection of service APIs, we have a little problem: for clients using APIs is a lot like drinking beer through a straw. You never get as much beer as you want and you get a headache after. But