AWS
This is a guest post by Frédéric Faure (architect at Ysance), you can follow him on twitter. Urbandive is an immersive view service launched by the French YellowPages which allows you to travel in cities in France thanks to a 360° view. Urbandive focuses on providing high definition pictures and
Hadoop
A demonstration, with repeatable steps, of how to quickly fire-up a Hadoop cluster on Amazon EC2, load data onto the HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File-System), write map-reduce scripts in Ruby and use them to run a map-reduce job on your Hadoop cluster. You will not need to ssh into the cluster,
Product
Queuing work for processing in the background is a time tested scalability strategy. Queuing also happens to be one of those much needed tools where it easy enough to forge for your own that we see a lot of different versions made. Resque is GitHub's take on a
Product
At 37 Signals Joshua Sierles describes how 37 Signals uses Sprinkle to configure their servers within EC2. Sprinkle defines a domain specific meta-language for describing and processing the installation of software. You can find an interesting discussion of Sprinkle's creation story by the creator himself, Marcus Crafter, in
PHP
This article explains how Outside.in, the local social network and aggregator, scaled up its service and moved from PHP to Ruby on Rails (they moved maybe because Ruby code seemed to be more maintanable that PHP code?). The whole article is here on EngineYard blog.
Example
Lukas Biewald shares a fascinating slam by slam recount of how his FaceStat (upload your picture and be judged by the masses) site was battered by a link on Yahoo's main page that caused an almost instantaneous 650,000 page view jump on their site. Yahoo spends considerable