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On Cascading Failures and Amazon’s Elastic Block Store
This post is one in a series discussing storage architectures in the cloud. Read Network Storage in the Cloud: Delicious but Deadly and Magical Block Store: When Abstractions Fail Us for more insight. Resilient, adjective, /riˈzilyənt/ “Able to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions”. In patients with a cough, you know what commonly causes…
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Facebook’s Open Compute: The Data Center is the New Server and the Rise of the Taiwanese Tigers
Today Facebook took the great step of openly talking about their server and datacenter designs at the level of detail where they can actually be replicated by others. Another reason why I call it “great?” Well, it’s interesting that the sourcing and design of these was done by Facebook and with Taiwanese component makers. Nothing…
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Comparing Virtual Machines is Like Comparing Cars: It Doesn’t Get to their Actual Utility or Value
A BMW and a Yugo are both cars. In a Yugo, “carpet” was listed as a feature. Enough said. McCrory recently blogged a Public Cloud hourly cost comparison comparing Microsoft, Amazon, Rackspace and Joyent. I’m happy to see Joyent included in such great company but the comparisons are between “VMs.” As stated by Alistair Croll,…
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HTTP FTW
I was reading “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet” today and a good response on gigaom. To a number of people, “the web” = HTTP. And HTTP as a protocol on the Internets has clearly won. The fun thing to notice is that “the web” to Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff is just…
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Part 2, On Joyent and Cloud Computing “Primitives”
In the first part of this series I made a key list of some of the underlying ideas at Joyent, that we believe that a company or even a small development team should be able to: Participate in a multi-tenant service Have your own instantiations of this service Install (and “buy”) the software to run…
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On Joyent and “Cloud Computing”, Part 1 of Many
With this post, I’m starting a series where we’re going to be much more explicit about what we’re thinking, what we’re doing, how we’re doing it and where we’re going. I’m not interested in any of it being thought of as impersonal “marketing material”, so I hope you’ll allow the occasional use of “I” and…
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What is Cloud Computing?
We went to the Web 2.0 Expo and asked “What is Cloud Computing ?”. YouTube has a high definition version of What is Cloud Computing Check out what the following people had to say: Tim O’Reilly Dan Farber Matt Mullenweg Jay Cross Brian Solis Kevin Marks Rafe Needleman Steve Gillmor Jeremy Tanner Maggie Fox Tom…
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NetApp versus Sun, Sun versus NetApp, and Both versus Common Sense
As you might have heard and likely read in the back-and-forth blogging of Dave Hitz (a NetApp founder) and Jonathan Schwartz (CEO of Sun Microsystems), the two are at each other’s throats. Well not really at each other’s throats: NetApp went nuclear and Sun hit back even harder. Basically NetApp says that Sun’s ZFS steals…
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Virtualization is more than just consolidation
I was asked to co-present with an engineer from Sun at an upcoming conference in October. I asked him to do his slides and then shoot me over the presentation so I could fill in my half. I noticed that his view of virtualization and mine were very different. To put it into jargon speak,…
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“Is language X scalable? I heard that it isn’t”
A nonsensical question that is rarely qualified. To quote Theo from his fine book Languages aren’t slow; implementations of languages are. and Language selection and scalability have little to do with each other; architectural design and implementation strategy dictate how scalable a final product will be. I couldn’t have put it better myself. The point…
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Jason A. Hoffman 