Industrialist
I was reading GigaOM the other day, specifically Google’s 2006 Money Shot, $10 billion in revenues, and his quote from Google’s earning release caught my eye: Other cost of revenues, which is comprised primarily of data center operational expenses, as well as credit card processing charges, increased to $307 million, or 10% of revenues, in … Continue reading The 10% “rule” for infrastructure costs
I’ll be doing a half-day tutorial at RailsConf 2007 Thursday morning titled Scaling a Rails Application from the Bottom Up. The abstract is: Ruby On Rails is an opinionated framework for developing web applications and has a considerable amount of flexibility in the back end. While the framework is quite successful in removing the need … Continue reading Jason Hoffman will be doing a tutorial at RailsConf 2007 in Portland
Great article on the origins of ZFS by Al Riske. (Found link from Gruber on Daring Fireball.) We’ve written about ZFS many times on this weblog. Oh, and Bill and Jeff aren’t as goofy as they appear in the article. Jeff (on the right) is actually a fine wine expert in addition to roasting his … Continue reading Origins of ZFS
There’s a lot of talk lately about “grids”. And Amazon. The word “grid” has reappeared in marketing materials and we’ve seen it brought up during the the emergence of companies offering utility computing and storage products (or at least they want you to think that’s what they’re really offering). There’s also definitely been a PR … Continue reading On Grids, the Ambitions of Amazon and Joyent
Sun is releasing the source to Java SE, Java ME, and Glassfish in nine and a half hours, and then releasing the rest of the stuff around the spring of 2007. Most interestingly they’re releasing it under the GPLv2 license. Floyd Marinescu has a great explanation as to ‘Why GPL?’. Once it hit midnight eastern … Continue reading 9.5 hours until Java is open-sourced
Via this and that, I found myself reading PHP Eats Rails for Breakfast The title PHP Eats Rails for Breakfast and subtitle Despite the buzz around sexy new frameworks like Rails and Django, PHP is more dominant than ever initially commits the same fallacy that others have and that is to compare frameworks (Rails and … Continue reading Are Lines of Code really a measure of either success, productivity or popularity?
The Rails Conference in London was great fun. The only downside is that I spent my last day there ill, and it’s only now (about 9 days later) that I’m starting to feel OK. Mind you, I still completely barfed (correction: projectile vomited) up lunch today and have a nagging cough, a cough that while … Continue reading Jason Hoffman’s European Rails Conf Presentation
Via Ludo I came to read why processes scale better than threads (a topic that comes around every now and then). But the case is really made in Joe Armstrong’s recent Concurrency is Easy where he does a great job connecting the philosophy behind erlang to common human experiences. Each human is a process you … Continue reading Erlang processes are human too
Zed Shaw’s mongrel “is a fast HTTP library and server for Ruby that is intended for hosting Ruby web applications of any kind using plain HTTP rather than FastCGI or SCGI.” And saying that it’s “fast” is true. The performance you get from a single mongrel process listening on a port is quite good. You … Continue reading Evaluating proxy engines and load balancers for mongrel-driven ruby on rails applications: an introduction and an open call
Ah, Ben understands and did a great demonstration of thin provisioning (also read Dave’s Blog) with ZFS using sparse volumes (zvols). HUGE. The ability to thin provision storage is a very “enterprise” feature that one can know get from free when using ZFS+Opensolaris. When combined with ethernet-based storage networks (iSCSI), it’s unstoppable. Ben’s also a … Continue reading Thin Provisioning in ZFS
