Amazoogle News

Google Code Jam up and running on App Engine

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 02:27:59 -0400

Google Code Jam up and running on App Engine:

The Google Code Jam contest site contains a live scoreboard that is tracking the results for over 7000 contestants.

Perl Catalyst and Cloud Computing

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 02:20:25 -0400

Perl Catalyst and Cloud Computing:

Lengthy interview with Perl developer Frank Speiser in which he discusses his soon-to-be-released Net::Cloud module.

How to do AVG and SUM in Google App Engine Data Store

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:29:03 -0400

How to do AVG and SUM in Google App Engine Data Store:

App Engine Guy shows one way to do aggregate queries.

White Paper on 'Cloud Architectures' and Best Practices of Amazon S3, EC2, SimpleDB, SQS

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:16:05 -0400

White Paper on 'Cloud Architectures' and Best Practices of Amazon S3, EC2, SimpleDB, SQS:

New White paper from Amazon that discusses best practices for building applications in the Cloud:

“Cloud Architectures are Services-Oriented Architectures that are designed to use On-demand infrastructure more effectively. Applications built on Cloud Architectures are such that the underlying computing infrastructure is used only when it is needed (for example to process a user request), draw the necessary resources on-demand (like compute servers or storage), perform a specific job, then relinquish the unneeded resources after the job is done. While in operation the application scales up or down elastically based on actual need for resources. Everything is automated and operates without any human intervention.”

Google Teh Evil? Cloud economics, BigTable + GFS vs. EU privacy laws

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:16:41 -0400

Google Teh Evil? Cloud economics, BigTable + GFS vs. EU privacy laws:

Can European companies store data in US data centers, or is that against EU law? Can Google accomodate European companies by segregating data geographically, or are they architecting their data storage system to be one global system?

Mark Masterson explores the tension between national privacy laws and global cloud computing systems, and contrasts the different approaches that Google and Amazon are taking.

RumorMill: Microsoft to Rollout EC2 for Windows in October 2008

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 02:13:15 -0400

RumorMill: Microsoft to Rollout EC2 for Windows in October 2008:

Reuven Cohen is hearing rumors that Microsoft is building an “EC2 for Windows” cloud offering.

Elasticfox vs Jollat

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 02:11:05 -0400

Elasticfox vs Jollat:

John Willis compares two tools for managing Amazon Web Services: the Firefox extension ElasticFox, and a new standalone application, Jollat.

BulkDownload - gawsh - Google Code

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 02:04:46 -0400

BulkDownload - gawsh - Google Code:

Lack of a bulk data exporter is widely recognized as one of the biggest limitations of Google App Engine. Garrett Davis has attempted to plug that gap with gawsh, his new bulk download tool. He’s quick to point out some of its current limitatations: it can’t handle reference properties, list data, and blobs. Also, strings must be ASCII.

Getting started with Zope on Google App Engine

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 01:53:29 -0400

Getting started with Zope on Google App Engine:

“Thanks to a patch published by Kapil Thangavelu, it’s quite straight-forward to get set up to use Zope on Google’s App Engine.”

— Malthe Borch

Cloud Maturity Is Accelerating: More Than Just Reaction To The Hype?

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 10:38:08 -0400

Cloud Maturity Is Accelerating: More Than Just Reaction To The Hype?:

James Staten from Forrester Research rounds up some recent announcements and opines that cloud computing is a trend that’s here to stay:

“It’s still early days and we certainly aren’t seeing the type of enterprise implementations we would expect to signal a high growth phase, but it’s starting to look like cloud computing may have greater legs than the utility computing efforts that came before it.”

Google App Engine: no support, quotas, throttling… Help!

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:49:20 -0400

Google App Engine: no support, quotas, throttling… Help!:

Aral Balkan makes some good points in a lengthy post where he details his frustrations with Google App Engine’s quotas and the non-responsiveness of the Google App Engine team.

How to do some service discovery on Amazon EC2

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:44:37 -0400

How to do some service discovery on Amazon EC2:

Elastic Grid Blog discusses how they solve the problem of service discovery, without using an external service (like SimpleDB or a separate monitor process).

Google App Engine optimizations

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:31:01 -0400

Google App Engine optimizations:

Niall Kennedy shares some best practices for App Engine development, including data optimization tips for Google’s hosted Bigtable instance, ways to reduce the errors and resource usage of your application, and what steps you should add to your deployment checklist.

Rich Wolsky on Eucalyptus: Open Source Cloud Computing (Video Interview - Part 1 of 2)

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:25:21 -0400

Rich Wolsky on Eucalyptus: Open Source Cloud Computing (Video Interview - Part 1 of 2):

Virtualization.com has an exclusive interview with Rich Wolski, Director of the Eucalyptus project.

Cloud Computing vs. Grid Computing

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:34:33 -0400

Cloud Computing vs. Grid Computing:

Thorsten von Eicken talks about the distinction between grid computing (which is concerned with batch processing) and cloud computing (which is concerned with on-demand resource allocation). As he puts it in a later comment to his blog post:

“The most fundamental principle in cloud computing is being able to bring the next server from boot into full production on auto-pilot. This solves many problems, from repairing failures, to scaling up and down with load, to launching additional deployments for special purposes (staging, demo, test, etc). The notion that when you need additional resources you go and get them is different. It doesn’t exist in batch processing.”

Scaling on EC2

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:27:17 -0400

Scaling on EC2:

WebMynd talks about how they utilize Amazon Web Services to scale up.

Announcing fofou - forum software for Google App Engine

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 04:24:22 -0400

Announcing fofou - forum software for Google App Engine:

Krzysztof Kowalczyk announces his open-source forum software for Google App Engine whose interface is modeled on the Joel on Software Forums, which he considers to be vastly superior to the more common phpBB forums.

3 and 1/2 minutes to sort a Terabyte, and a look at Hadoop's code structure

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 04:17:22 -0400

3 and 1/2 minutes to sort a Terabyte, and a look at Hadoop's code structure:

Bill de hÓra notes that Hadoop has just set a record in the “annual general purpose (daytona) terabyte sort benchmark” and also provides an overview of how the Hadoop code is structured.

Sisense - An Analytics Dashboard for Amazon S3

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 04:12:27 -0400

Sisense - An Analytics Dashboard for Amazon S3:

Read Write Web profiles a new offering from Sisense, which aims to simplify Amazon S3 log analysis:

“Sisense aims to be the Google Analytics for Amazon S3 with it’s Prism dashboard by providing developers with a more visual interface. Best of all, it’s free.”

Google under pressure as App Engine requests rise

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:19:48 -0400

Google under pressure as App Engine requests rise:

An estimated 200,000 developers have Google App Engine accounts, and they are now clamoring for more features. Juan Carlos Perez quotes several developers and gets their take on what Google’s priorities should be.