Software Reality Day by Day

We launched Videolla.com

noreply@blogger.com (Vlad Gurgov) — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 11:35:00 +0000

You should check out Videolla.com. Its a new web service build by OBS Labs
Videolla allows you publish and sell online videos easily. Check out 70 sec tour video (powered by videolla of course :)

We just moved!

noreply@blogger.com (Vlad Gurgov) — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:25:00 +0000

OBS Team in Russia have just moved to the new bigger office!
This was our old place:

And this is our new place:

So you want to build a web startup?

noreply@blogger.com (Vlad Gurgov) — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 08:34:00 +0000

So you want to build a web startup?

View more presentations from OBS Labs.

Amazing sketching tool!

noreply@blogger.com (Vlad Gurgov) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:53:00 +0000

http://mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/harmony/ Amazing web tool for sketching!! This tool will make you feel like real artist even if you never hold pencil before. Great illustration of javascript/html5 power. And it works on iphone! Supa-crazy!

rish.ru - Russian Internet School

noreply@blogger.com (Vlad Gurgov) — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 13:45:00 +0000

Rish.ru is a new Russian startup in education space. They use AdobeConnect-powered solution to give paid classes and test prep lessons. They started with test prep on Math, Biology, Phisics etc. Typical price of classes vary from 0 up to $40

Riak vs Rails

noreply@blogger.com (Vlad Gurgov) — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:41:00 +0000

Our next project will real time chat application. No rocket science but we expect that it might work under very high load so scalability is our #1 goal. As we all know DB scalability is #1 challenge in Rails stack. Everything else scales really well.

We recently found this article about Riak and will be testing it soon with our app. Here is the link to article itself
We will post our test result soon.

Why Riak should power your next Rails app

Last fall, I heard about Riak and thought it sounded awesome, and it boasts a lot of neat features that I’ll go into detail about below. I was further impressed when I met the Basho team at nosqleast in Atlanta. They really seem to know what they’re doing.
In December, John Nunemaker wrote a post entitled Why I think MongoDB is to Databases what Rails was to Frameworks. I commented on twitter:

If as @jnunemaker says, #mongodb is like Rails for databases, then #riak is like Merb.

His reply was quite humorous (no, John, Riak won’t merge into MongoDB), but it got me thinking. So here are my…

7 Reasons why Riak is the Merb of databases (or better)

…and why it should be the database for your next Rails app.

Scales horizontally without pain

Riak runs just about in the same way on 1 node as it does 100. This is because, in short, it is an implementation of Amazon’s Dynamo. Need more storage capacity, throughput and availability? Add more nodes.
Now, a lot of people throw around the word “scalability” without really knowing what it means. It’s really a ratio of the desired properties of your system to the cost inherent in achieving those goals. High scalability means you have a low cost in proportion to your ability to grow. It has nothing to do with performance (although good performance can be a side-effect of good scalability). By this measure, actually, Rails scales well (shared nothing) — but that doesn’t mean it’s always performant (slow Ruby implementations, large memory consumption, etc). Despite the trolls, it’s pretty well known that Twitter’s scaling problems were not really caused by Rails.
So what makes Riak more capable of handling growth than MongoDB, CouchDB or MySQL? It’s built with master-less replication in mind from the beginning. When you grow a MongoDB or MySQL database, you typically add a slave server which receives and replays the transaction logs of the master server. Ideally, this slave can take over if the master goes down. There are also master-master setups and other ways of configuring replication, but in general it’s a thing you add on, not built-in.
Instead, Riak has no notion of a master database node. Every node participates equally in the cluster and spreads the load in a predictable way using consistent hashing (another feature of Dynamo). So yes, increasing capacity and throughput and all those other things you expect from your database is as easy as starting up new nodes and having them join the ring. Data will be replicated in the background. You can even run Riak nodes on less-powerful machines (think EC2) and get decent results. Large, monolithic DB servers are the last vestige of the mainframe era, so democratize your database layer!

HTTP-Compliant REST interface

Rails nerds like me love REST, but most don’t really understand what it means, or rather think that it is a one-to-one mapping to CRUD. Rails’ concept of REST is at best incomplete and potentially misleading. (See also Scott Raymond’s RailsConf 2007 talk)
The Riak developers spent a lot of time creating an awesome toolkit in Erlang for building RFC-compliant HTTP resources, and Riak has several of them. This means that when interacting with Riak, you use HTTP in a natural way and get predictable responses — even the hard stuff like content-negotiation, entity tags and conditional methods.
The side effect of composing Riak of well-behaved HTTP resources is that it plays very nicely with other HTTP-related infrastructure, including proxies, load balancers, caches, and clients of all stripes.

Robust failure recovery

One of Riak’s most compelling features is that it handles node failure robustly. If a node goes down in your cluster, its replicas will take over for it until it comes back, a feature known as hinted handoff. If it doesn’t come back — as happens all too often on EC2 — you can add a new node and the cluster will rebalance. The failure recovery story for MySQL, even in a replicated scenario, is much more difficult, time-consuming, and costly.
Riak has fine-grained robustness as well. It was built primarily in Erlang and with the OTP Design Principles in mind. One aspect of the OTP design is that the processes in the system are organized in a supervision tree, so that when one crashes, it will be restarted by its supervisor process (which is in turn supervised). Send some bad data to the web interface and get a 500 error? That internal error doesn’t crash the whole system, bringing your database node down.
Justin Sheehy, Basho’s CTO, tells a story of a customer whose cluster had two nodes go down late one night. The Basho team looked for less than 10 minutes at the cluster, verified that it was still going, and then decided to wait until the morning to fix the lost nodes. As Joe Armstrong, Father of Erlang, says (paraphrased), “In order to have fault tolerance, you need more than one computer.” Riak embraces that philosophy.

Links make graph-like structures possible

Most Dynamo implementations are simple key-value stores. While that’s still pretty useful — Dynomite is really awesome at storing large binary objects, for example — sometimes you need to find things without a priori knowledge of the key.
The first way that Riak deals with this is with link-walking. Every datum stored in Riak can have one-way relationships to other data via the Link HTTP header. In the canonical example, you know the key of a band that you have stored in the “artists” bucket (Riak buckets are like database tables or S3 buckets). If that artist is linked to its albums, which are in turn linked to the tracks on the albums, you can find all of the tracks produced in a single request. As I’ll describe in the next section, this is much less painful than a JOIN in SQL because each item is operated on independently, rather than a table at a time. Here’s what that query would look like:

GET /raw/artists/TheBeatles/albums,_,_/tracks,_,1

“/raw” is the top of the URL namespace, “artists” is the bucket, “TheBeatles” is the source object key. What follows are match specifications for which links to follow, in the form of bucket,tag,keep triples, where underscores match anything. The third parameter, “keep” says to return results from that step, meaning that you can retrieve results from any step you want, in any combination. I don’t know about you, but to me that feels more natural than this:

SELECT tracks.* FROM tracks
  INNER JOIN albums ON tracks.album_id =  albums.id
  INNER JOIN artists ON albums.artist_id = artists.id
  WHERE artists.name = "The Beatles"

The caveat of links is that they are inherently unidirectional, but this can be overcome with little difficulty in your application. Without referential integrity constraints in your SQL database (which ActiveRecord has made painful in the past), you have no solid guarantee that your DELETE or UPDATE won’t cause a row to become orphaned, anyway. We’re kind of spoiled because ActiveRecord handles the linkage of associations automatically.
The place where the link-walking feature really shines is in self-referential and deep transitive relationships (think has_many :through writ large). Since you don’t have to create a virtual table via a JOIN and alias different versions of the same table, you can easily do things like social network graphs (friends-of-friends-of-friends), and data structures like trees and lists.

Powerful Map-Reduce and soon, Lucene search

The second way to find data stored in Riak is using Map-Reduce. Unlike links, where you have to start with a known key, you can run map-reduce jobs over any number of keys or an entire bucket.
One thing that might not be immediately obvious when using an SQL database is that the declarative nature of the query language hides the imperative nature of performing the query. SQL databases have sophisticated query planners that decompose your query into several steps (see EXPLAIN command on MySQL) and attempt to optimize the order of those steps based on known table properties, like indices, keys, and row counts. Riak’s map-reduce, while still largely declarative, lets you decide which order to run steps in. You trade a little abstraction for a lot of power.
Riak’s map-reduce is also quite different from CouchDB’s views:

You’re not trying to build an index which you’ll query later, you’re performing the query.
You can have any number and combination of map, reduce and link phases (link is actually a special case of map).
Since it’s not an index, your query need not be contiguous across the keyspace.
There’s no concept of re-reduce because reduce phases are only run once.

Up until recently, you could only write map-reduce jobs in Erlang, but thanks to Kevin Smith’s awesome work, you can now write jobs in Javascript and submit them over the HTTP interface. This opens up a lot of doors to developers who aren’t familiar with Erlang but use Javascript every day.
Although not complete or released, Basho also has an awesome Lucene-compatible search system in the pipeline (already in use at Collecta, or so I hear). I saw it in action this past week while in Boston and was impressed. It’s fairly comparable in performance to Solr for large datasets, but scales across your Riak cluster.

Beyond schema-less: Content-type agnostic

One thing that may seem unintuitive at first is that Riak doesn’t care what type of content you put in it. CouchDB and MongoDB use JSON and BSON (Binary JSON), respectively, to store objects. Instead of forcing a format, Riak lets you store pretty much anything. There’s no concept of “attachments” or “GridFS” (unless you add it yourself), so just store the file directly in a bucket/key with a PUT or POST request. As long as you specify the “Content-Type” header, Riak will remember it and give you back the right thing when you access it the next time. No need to do base 64 encoding to store a picture, PDF, Word document, podcast, or whatever. This could enable you to replace a distributed filesystem like GFS, or even S3, with a Riak cluster. Bonus: you get replication and fail-over for no extra cost.
There are some minor kinks with large files (>100MB), but I’ve been assured by Basho that they are addressing the issue. In the meantime, you could chunk the file manually and follow links to get the pieces and put them back together.

Tunable levels of consistency, durability, and performance

The knee-jerk argument against Dynamo-like data stores is that they don’t have ACID properties and that “eventual consistency” is too eventual. In practice, especially in large deployments and high throughput scenarios, ACID breaks down because it requires actions to be “all or nothing”, effectively creating bottlenecks while clients wait for transaction handles. If you’ve done any distributed or concurrent computing, you know that contention for shared resources is a primary cause of failure, including problems like deadlock, starvation and race conditions. For the sake of reducing single points of failure (bottlenecks), Riak implements eventual consistency — where storage operations are accepted immediately, and then propagated across the cluster in an asynchronous fashion. This makes it nearly always available for writes and reads.
In order to deal with inconsistency, Riak tags each datum with a vector clock that internally reveals the datum’s lineage (who modified what version). When there are conflicts — that is, two parallel versions of the same datum — Riak returns you both versions so that your application can decide how to resolve it. In an SQL database with this kind of conflict, your transaction might fail and rollback, forcing you to resolve it and retry anyway.
Beyond just eventual consistency, Riak lets you tune the amount of consistency, durability, and availability you want, even somewhat at request-time. If you need more read availability and replication, you can increase the N value for a bucket (number of replicas, default 3). If you want to be sure the data you’re reading is consistent across the cluster, increase the R value at request time (R, read quorum, is always <= N). If you want high assurance that your data is stored, increase the W and DW values (W = write quorum, DW = durable-write quorum, both always <= N). If you want better performance, e.g. to use Riak as a persistent cache, keep the R, W, and DW values low. You also have the choice of which backend to use when storing your data on the replicas (anything from in-memory to on-disk, or combinations), including the recently released Innostore. Although in many cases the defaults are good enough, you have the flexibility to choose a model that fits your application.
(Note: currently, the N value must be set before you insert any data into the bucket).

Why Riak for Rails?

Ok, so those are the reasons why Riak is awesome in my mind. Why should you use it in your Rails app (or other Ruby application)? Here are some possibilities:

Scale up (or down) cheaply: Riak can grow horizontally with your app, either in lock-step (have database nodes on your app servers!) or independently. A colleague described it as a “Christmas tree” — you could have a load-balanced cluster of Ruby processes and behind that a load-balanced cluster of Riak nodes.
Ease of deployment: No longer do you need to break out or specialize nodes to be database-only, unless you want to. The homogeneity will make your sysadmins happy, and HTTP-friendliness means they already know how to grow the infrastructure.
Flexibility: You can use Riak as a document database, a cache store, a session store, a log server, or a distributed filesystem, with custom settings for each scenario. Soon you’ll also be able to use it as a Solr search replacement.
Powerful modeling: Use links to create relationships in a natural fashion, reducing the number of JOIN-like operations, and then discover data using arbitrary-depth link-walking, or create custom queries with map-reduce.
Background processing and analytics, a.k.a. Big Data: With high write availability and the powerful map-reduce framework, you could defer complicated calculations and later run them in parallel across the Riak cluster. Think data warehouses or Hadoop, but with 1/10 the LoC and no Java.

Where Riak has room to grow

I love Riak’s capabilities, but let’s face it — no system is perfect. Here’s where it could be improved:

Library support: Although it’s REST so you can theoretically use any HTTP client, the included client libraries are pretty basic and use the soon-to-be-deprecated “jiak” interface. I expect that this will improve real soon — we’ve already seen an open-source Java client released.
Efficient ad-hoc lookup: If you only know the bucket of an object but not its key, it’s potentially expensive to find it, since Riak has no concept of indices other than the key (for obvious reasons – it doesn’t know the structure of your content). In the meantime you have two options – eagerly create and maintain them yourself by adding objects with meaningful keys that link back to your original object; or create a map-reduce job to achieve the same result.
Reduce-phase bottleneck: Map and link phases happen with great data-locality, on the nodes where the data is stored, but reduce phases happen in a single node. This is logically simple, but introduces a potential bottleneck and point of failure. If reduce phases are also referentially transparent and idempotent, they could be federated as well, and only incur the single-node hit at the very end.
Large files: Due to some YAGNI-related issues in Webmachine and Riak’s object storage, you can’t load big files into Riak. Break your “l33t xv1dz” into chunks or store them in the filesystem for now.

What to do next

I have lots more to say about Riak (hard to believe, right?), so watch for more blog posts in the future. If you’re ready to dive in, check out the Riak dev site, sign up for the mailing list, or join in the discussion in the IRC channel on Freenode.

Rails 3.0 Beta released!

noreply@blogger.com (Vlad Gurgov) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 08:52:00 +0000

Finally! Thank to David and Core Team! Read more
Check it out now!

gem install tzinfo builder memcache-client rack rack-test rack-mount erubis mail text-format thor bundler i18n 
gem install rails --pre

Our website was updated!

noreply@blogger.com (Vlad Gurgov) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:02:00 +0000

Check out www.obsgroup.biz. Please let us know if you find any typos :)

We are "confirmed"! :)

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:08:00 +0000

Yahoo! OBS Labs got official "confirmed" status from Engine Yard's Rails Development directory:
http://www.railsdevelopment.com/developers/obs-labs

We need your feedback!

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:17:00 +0000

If you've get in touch with me or my company OBS Labs for Rails consulting and development please leave us feedback here:
http://www.railsdevelopment.com/developers/obs-labs/recommendations/new

Thanks! We need your voice!

Entrepreneurs can change the world join the momenent.

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:32:00 +0000

Just wanted to share an idea of our new clients. I really liked their inspirational video:

http://grasshopper.com/idea/

8 Facts about the Russian Startup Scene

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:24:00 +0000

Together with my friend Bjoern Herrmann we compiled this short article about Russian Startup Scene

8 Facts about the Russian Startup Scene

Did you ever wonder about the startup scene in St. Petersburg and Moscow? I spent this summer in St.Petersburg and Moscow and did some deep research. Earlier I was quite unaware - therefore I was pleasantly surprised and excited to find out how vibrant and ambitious the scene really is! Watch out for the Russians ;-)!!

Here are 8 points you should know.

Read full article on Startup School Blog

Supercool startup recommends OBS Labs!

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 12:35:00 +0000

We are now working in close partnership with SuperCoolSchool (http://beta.supercoolschool.com) - very promising San Francisco-based startup in online education.
They just posted recommendation for us on their blog - check this out:
http://supercoolschool.typepad.com/blog/2009/01/resommendation-for-a-supercool-ror-team-in-russia-.html

Our internal project!

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 11:33:00 +0000

Finally this happened !
After we created over 20 projects for our clients in US, UK, Germany, Switzerland, Australia...
OBS Labs works on our own startup ! Two of our top Rails developers work on building alpha version (proof of concept) project.

I cant tell really much about it as its still in stealth mode. I spend quite some time for discussing this idea with developers, managers from US and Europe. Sounds like this can be something great but i still prefer to keep fingers crossed.
Its going to be done for Europe and Asian markets and has successful prototypes on US market (yeah US already invented everything, all you can do is adopt it locally). It is all about socializing and surviving in crisis times. I really cant tell anything more at the moment but i am very excited about this idea!
The next big thing is coming!

New US phone: +1 (415) 8303 771

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 11:22:00 +0000

We changed our US phone number to +1 (415) 8 303 77 1

Wheather you are looking for new affordable software development partner, consultant on Ruby on Rails or just want to discuss your idea about next web project -feel free to call us! Normally i answer myself or one of our developers can take a message.

We dont have office manager here - yeah we all have to learn IKEA lessons especially in crisis times :)

New Rails projects!

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 11:09:00 +0000

Many important things happened here in OBS Labs since my last post. We visited European Rails conference in Berlin, Germany. We completed Social Network site for web startup in Switzerland (hope its going to be another exciting site about wine). We participated in softlaunch of Quevita (http://www.quevita.com/) potentially largest European social network around healthy living style.

Now i am in conversation with Supercool School (supercoolschool.com). This can be non-profit project where i and some of our developers could use our Rails coding skills to bring Change in Africa and countries with weak education system. This is going to be top cool project and i cant wait to join this Supercool team.

Launch application in 6 weeks - myth or reality?

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 11:05:00 +0000

Some great Rails development companies guarantee that they can launch the first version of your desired app in just as fast as 6 weeks!

WoW! That sounds great- we can get desirable result in about 1.5 month - this is the way one can think of it...

Is it real?
Yes it is. There is no magic here and you don't have to be David Blane to do it. Here is where the trick is. Most companies (including OBS Labs) use Rails in pair with Agile development(SCRUM, eXtreme Programming or whatever). In this approach development divide into series of 2 week iterations. As a result of each iteration clients receive fully-workable and tested code, that includes few (5-10) features for that iteration. After reviewing iteration result features for the next iter. are discussed together with client.
So typically in 6 weeks you can have 3 iteration and from 15-30 featured fully workable application. Isn't it enough for average 1.0 version, prototype or whatever? Well, it definitely should be enough to make client to sign long term contract ;-)
How can OBS Labs beat it?
Well, at first we are not trying to compete with anyone. We are small, experienced at what we are doing for years, do it good and our clients love us for that dedicated approach.
We use same latest Rails technologies, contribute to new open source trendy stuff as well, use same practices for project management, trying to keep quality as our idol.
And when you can buy two similar products you should consider price as a important factor.

Personally i love American cars. I am currently driving 2005 Chevy Tahoe and i am so happy with it. In Europe its quite expensive to have American full size, but i still love it. Those who know a little about this car know that its build on same platform as other GM models like Chevy Silverado, Chevy Suburban, Caddy Escalade and Hummer H2. I dont need to carry bike or logs so i don't need Silverado, i am not Texas farmer with 5 kids so i dont need Suburban, i dont like rap so no need for Caddy, and offroad is not for me so H2 wasn't my choice. For me my Tahoe is just the smart choice between this models. I simply dont want to pay extra $$$ for chrome on wheels and handles while I enjoy full size car, i never had problems with taking additional passenger or bag with me and i am not scared with hard road conditions. The right choice for me.

OBS value for similar project would be as much as about 3 times less than other companies can offer. They will charge you about $120-$150/hour saying that they are the only and the best experts on that market. We normally charge about $50/hour, while paying our developers about the same rate as they do! (Today rates of developers in Russia rising to EU and US ranges, and its not a good way to save just on salaries) How can we handle it? The answer is simple both they and we are using offshore developers , but our developers are all in on office in Russia, we cant afford to invest as much in marketing and advertising, being Formula1 team sponsor pay top $$$ to managers and shareholders(OBS Labs is hold by developers themselves). When you work with OBS Labs the structure of your costs is simple, clear and top efficient!

Sounds good, can you show me some examples?
You are always welcome. We just recently completed and launched social networking application in one man/month, we created ecommerce and mailing application in 2 weeks! Some time ago we did simple CMS system in about 4 weeks? Want some more? I can refer to both clients who work with us for years and clients competed their first goals for less than 6 weeks. Please contact me directly by vlad _at) obsgroup.biz for more information and consultancy on your project.

Some Rails code tips

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 10:54:00 +0000

Recently we did internal code review for one of our clients.
After results been send we were asked whats wrong with code we pointed out:

v = params[:vintage].to_i if v < 100
if v < (Date.today.year - 2000)
v = 2000 + v
else
v = 1900 + v
end
end

One developer failed to explain, because he wasn't the guy who did this review and he didn't know the context.
The context was the it was inside one of the actions instead being separate method in controller or even in helper.
The tendency in Rails (accordind to its creators, and common sense) says that action code should be as simple as possible - in perfect world just calls to some methods and rendering page
In this case it should be something like

v = get_vine_vintage(params[:vintage])

or something, with method defined somewhere else. We always should keep controller actions code clean and readable.

After European RailsConf

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 10:44:00 +0000

Thanks to everyone who met us at RailsConf in Berlin! It was nice to meet all of you and to hear the last tendencies in Rails development from principals.

This year event wasn't as popular as year before but i believe its all for good. After being known as a silver bullet for killing web projects that everyone wanted to hire, Rails is becoming de-facto one of the smartest options for small-medium size web projects.

Some update on our projects: we are running 3 projects for our Swiss clients at the moment, still working with one of the oldest and most valuable clients in US, looking forward to pick another US client which is a well-known web 2.0 site.

Rails Conference Europe '08

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:40:00 +0000

Don't forget to register on European Rails Conf that will be held 02-04.09 in Berlin, Germany!
OBS had a lot of fun there last year, same as on main event in Portland, OR.
Registration site:
europe.railsconf.org

See you at Railsconf!

OBS Labs Launches the First RoR Social Network Adult Site

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 09:04:00 +0000

Recently we released version one of Dominatrix (www.dominr.com)– the first Adult social network website based on RoR.
It was done in just a few weeks by Dmitry Vyazov, OBS Labs Senior RoR Developer.
Site offers popular features enabling people collaborate – private messages, photo galleries, blogs. In just a few days over 30 users already registered there. We hope that target audience will find this resource very useful
“Using Ruby on Rails helped us to run site fast and keep good possibilities for extending and scaling application”, Dmitry says.

Kyte: Check this out!

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 09:03:00 +0000

Mail Servers Update

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 07:51:00 +0000

We are in process of migration to the newer mail server.
Some of your emails to @obsgroup.biz may not be delivered

Please use "read report" option for all your emails to us with next two days.
Thank you!

New European Projects!

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:14:00 +0000

After my trip to Berlin, Germany I am happy to announce that we are continue and extend our relations with European SW companies

We will continue work on billing and potentially other modules for Berlin-based startup with is on Medea-exchange market. Their new product hopefully will play a revolutionary role in B2B media exchange and sales and OBS is happy to be a part of it!
We just signed long term contract with a new Zürich, Swiss-based startup company. They are in development of unique health-style community site. We hope that our team would help them a lot in this project. At initial state a team of just Alex and Slava will work with them, but potentially we are going to extend these relations.

We are very happy to grow up our business in Europe and always looking for a new partners there as well as in States and all over the World.

Amazon Web Services Services

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 23:06:00 +0000

We are proud to start up a new project using Amazon Web Services(tm) technology.

Basically it's an innovation technology that allows you to scale your applications on data and computing as easy as never before.

Simple Storage Service (S3) - is a technology used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time on web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own services.

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) - Just as S3 enables "storage in the cloud", Amazon EC2 enables "compute in the cloud". Amazon EC2's simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon's proven computing environment.

OBS Labs is just a one of a very few groups all over the world who have so deep experience with AWS platform. If you are interested in our services as well please feel free to contact us!