"cloud" entries

The future of technology and its impact on work

O'Reilly CIO Jonathan Reichental on how tech will shape the workforce.

In this presentation, O'Reilly CIO Jonathan Reichental discusses a range of future technology trends and what it will mean for work and the workforce.

How the cloud helps Netflix

Netflix's Adrian Cockcroft on the benefits of a cloud infrastructure.

Netflix moved some of its services into Amazon's cloud last year. In this interview, Netflix cloud architect Adrian Cockcroft says the move was about building a scalable product and paying down technical debt.

Feeding the community fuels advances at Red Hat and JBoss

Red Hat’s usual modus operandi is the precise inverse of most companies based on open source. This drives what I heard at Red Hat Summit and JBoss World, solid progress along the lines laid out by Red Hat and JBoss in previous years.

Open question: Would you rent a laptop?

The Google Chrome netbook rumors have expanded to include subscription-based distribution.

Can't afford to buy a laptop? You might be Google's next target audience. New rumors suggest the Internet giant may be plotting to rent laptops, complete with hardware updates and repair as needed.

What if a book is just a URL?

A software company and an Australian bookstore are experimenting with books in the cloud.

Australian indie bookstore Readings is in full experiment mode with a cloud-based pay-for-access model. Software and ebook files don't play a role — everything is done through the browser.

Four short links: 5 January 2011

Four short links: 5 January 2011

Cloud Checklist, Feedback Loops, Coverage Testing, and Un-national Services

  1. Multi-tenant SaaS Checklist — if you’re used to building single-site web apps, this is a simple overview of the differences when building multi-tenanted web apps. Nominally about Java, ending with a plug for its author’s product, but ignore all that and it’s still useful. (via Abhishek Tiwari on Twitter)
  2. Angel Investing: My First Three Years (Paul Buchheit) — interesting to see how it stacks up for him. What caught my eye was The more great YC companies there are, the more reasons there are for other smart founders to join YC–the clever feedback loop in YC, where graduates help the newbies, builds its quality and increases its first-mover advantage year after year. (via Hacker News)
  3. Coverstory — reports on coverage of unit tests in Xcode. (via Noah Gift on Delicious)
  4. A Musing About 2011 and an Un-National Generation (JP Rangaswami) — The emerging generations want to use services independent of location of “origin” and location of “delivery”. Attempts to create artificial scarcity (by holding on to dinosaur constructs like physical-location-driven identity) are being responded to by a whole slew of spoofing and anonymisation tools; as the law becomes more of an ass in this context, you can be sure that the tools will get better. Living in a country other than America brings this home.

Strata Gems: Whirr makes Hadoop and Cassandra a snap

Get control over cloud resources

The cloud makes clusters easy, but for rapid prototyping purposes, bringing up clusters still involves quite a bit of effort. The Whirr project makes cloud control simple.

My top 5 predictions for CIOs in 2011

Don't expect an easy ride in 2011. The challenges for CIOs will be more complex and disruptive.

As we look to 2011, the enlightened CIO must go after the most valuable projects and be a trusted adviser to those who commit dollars to organizational goals.

Strata Gems: Manage clusters with Mesos

An important project to watch in 2011

As big data systems evolve rapidly, the Mesos project aims to solve architectural and management headaches. One to watch for 2011.

Four short links: 9 December 2010

Four short links: 9 December 2010

Wireframing Javascript, Slow News, App Deployment, and Cloud Security

  1. Lowersrc — simple dynamic image placeholders for wireframing. Open source Javascript. (via Lachlan Hardy on Twitter)
  2. In Praise of the Long Form (Julie Starr) — It can be time consuming sifting through the daily wall of news stories and blogposts to find the handful of gems that genuinely interest or move you. These services, which recommend only a handful of excellent journalism pieces each day, can help. The act of selection, the human process of filtering, remains a valuable service.
  3. Glu — LinkedIn’s application deployment framework. (via Pete Warden)
  4. The Risky Cloud (Simon Phipps) — While the Internet itself may have a high immunity to attacks, a monoculture hosted on it does not. We might be able to survive a technical outage, but a political outage or a full-fledged termination of service are likely to put a company that’s relied on the cloud for critical infrastructure out of business.