- The Infinite Hows (John Allspaw) — when finding ways to improve systems to prevent errors, the process of diagnosis should be focused on the systems and less on the people. (aka “human error” is the result of a preceding systems error.) (aka “design for failure.”)
- Amazon Lambda — triggers in the cloud.
- Enchanted Objects (PNG) — organizing the Internet of Thing by human desires. (via Designing the Enchanted Future)
- Barbie Remixed (PDF) — brilliant remix of a book that missed the mark into one that hits the bullseye.
"Amazon Web Services" entries
Four short links: 20 November 2014
Postmortems, Cloud Triggers, IoT Desires, and Barbie Can Code
Strata Week: AWS and Rackspace, compared
How Amazon Web Services and Rackspace measure up; IBM's Watson goes to school; Google researches data; and what will we call really, really big data?
Here are a few stories from the data space that caught my attention this week.
Rackspace vs Amazon
As Rackspace continues to ramp up its services to compete with Amazon Web Services (AWS) — this week, announcing a partnership with Hortonworks to develop a cloud-based enterprise-ready Hadoop platform to compete against Amazon’s Elastic MapReduce — Derrick Harris at GigaOm compared apples to apples.
John Engates, CTO of Rackspace, told Harris the most fundamental difference between the two services is the level of control given to the customer. Harris writes that Rackspace’s new Hadoop services aims to give the customer “granular control over how their systems are configured and how their jobs run,” providing “the experience of owning a Hadoop cluster without actually owning any of the hardware.” Engates pointed out, “It’s not MapReduce as a service; it’s more Hadoop as a service.”
Harris also points out that Rackspace is considering making moves into NoSQL and looks at AWS’ DynamoDB service. He notes that Amazon and Rackspace aren’t the only players on any of these fields, pointing to the likes of Microsoft’s HDInsight, IBM’s BigInsights, Qubole, Infochimps, MongoDB, Cassandra and CouchDB-based services.
In related news, Rackspace announced its new Cloud Networks feature this week that allows customers to design their own networks on Rackspace’s Cloud Servers. In an interview with Jack McCarthy at CRN, Engates explained the background:
“When we went from dedicated physical networks to our public cloud, we lost the ability to segment these networks. We used to have a vLAN. As we moved to OpenStack, we wanted to give our customers the ability to enable segmented networks in the cloud. Cloud Networks gives customers a degree of control over how they build networks in the cloud, whether it’s building networks application servers or for Web servers or databases.”
Engates also points out the networks are software-defined, “so customers can program their network on the fly.” You can read more about the new feature on the Rackspace blog.