Netflix has open sourced Chaos Monkey, a service designed to terminate cloud computing instances in a controlled manner so companies can ensure their applications keep running when a virtual server dies unexpectedly. In the past year, Chaos Monkey has terminated more than 65,000 of Netflix’s instances. Read more »
There’s so much data available and such powerful tools for analyzing it that the world might be a lot better off if politicians listened to the data first, rather than their parties or constituents. Already, data is showing ways to limit everything from traffic to AIDS. Read more »
Companies doing business on the web and in the cloud must spend a lot on infrastructure to stay running and to support new services. Here’s what Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Zynga spent in the recent quarter, and what it might mean. Read more »
If Twitter wants to remain opaque about its practices, that’s fine — but it shouldn’t expect any slack from upset users or investors. Blaming a two-hour outage on an “infrastructural double-whammy” after remaining mum on even where its data centers are located doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Read more »
Cloud computing and open source software have freed IT practitioners from so much legacy vendor baggage over the past few years. Isn’t it time to free them from inane benchmark boasting, too? A crowdsourced platform where users share their real-world performance experiences could help. Read more »
Facebook is working on new, more-personal methods for letting users alert members of their social networks to content they find offensive or potentially embarrassing. It’s a good start in the quest to make social media — and perhaps the people who use them — more civil. Read more »
Sure, you can trust a site is delivering you the best search results, but sometimes it might be nice to dig down, see a little of what the system sees and find that needle in the haystack. A new semantic search interface might let that happen. Read more »
Benchmarking results from Zencoder show that Amazon Web Services beats out Google’s Compute Engine in a test of a specific CPU-intensive workload. Compute Engine’s performance was hindered by a lack of HPC instances, which Google could one day add. But it’s nice to see real-world comparisons. Read more »
Drawn to Scale’s Spire database is meant to be all things to all people — it combines Hadoop, HBase and SQL to provide a fast, scalable, robust experience — and now it has integrated with MapR’s Hadoop distribution. It’s no surprise the young company already claims big customers. Read more »
A Mountain View, Calif., storage startup called Tintri has raised $25 million for its virtualization-focused flash storage appliances. The appliances, called VMstore, mix hard-disk and solid-state drives and promise better storage performance than traditional systems for virtualized applications. We wrote about Tintri last summer as the […] Read more »
VMware has made two big acquisitions this month, both focusing in part on the ability to work with competitive hypervisor and cloud computing software. The company seems to get that the future is in making it easy for customers to choose. Read more »
If you’re reading this in Los Angeles right now, there’s a decent chance you’re doing so while stuck in traffic on a packed freeway. Well, help might be on the way if efforts from companies such as Xerox to make sense of traffic flows work out. Read more »
Remember when there were just two or three cloud computing platforms to choose from, and just about as many cloud databases? Well, as clouds have proliferated, so have the database services built on top of them. Here are the available services and where they’re running. Read more »
Heroku built an app that makes it easy for Mac users to download and get started using the PostreSQL database. Called Postgres.app, the product should be available in the App Store soon and includes a number of popular Postgres features and libraries. Read more »
The Silicon Strip is coming along nicely, and although they’re mostly young and relatively unknown, Las Vegas’s startups aren’t hurting for good ideas. Some are even growing beyond their wildest dreams. Here are five of the city’s most-promising. Read more »
My gut instinct is to call Senator Al Franken a well-meaning fool when it comes to his latest outcry — this time against the advent of facial-recognition software — but he actually has a point. Facial-recognition software opens up a whole new class of privacy concerns. Read more »
Nodeable is now offering a cloud service for processing and analyzing streams of data in real time. Its new flagship service, called StreamReduce, is built atop Twitter’s open source Storm framework and acts as Hadoop’s faster, nimbler front-end partner that delivers users insights as they happen. Read more »
EMC might be smarter than we thought it was. If it handles the rumored spin-out and the Maritz-Gelsinger transition well, the companies under its banner could do great things. Of course, there are a lot of moving parts here and the transition won’t be easy. Read more »
Basho Technologies, the company behind the Riak NoSQL database and the Riak CS cloud storage platform, has raised $11.1 million and has entered into a partnership with data center provider IDC Frontier to distribute its technology throughout Japan. Read more »
The number of principal engineers and other technical leaders leaving the company and trying to have big impacts elsewhere suggests VMware might achieve mafia status a la Sun Microsystems, Facebook, Google or PayPal. But is that good news for VMware? Read more »
Slowly but surely, health care is becoming a killer app for big data. Whether it’s Hadoop, machine learning or natural-language processing, folks in the worlds of medicine and hospital administration understand that data is the key to helping them take their fields to the next level. Read more »
While most of us are getting ready to coast into the weekend, maybe making plans to hit up happy hour later, Neal Mueller is setting out with three other men to become the first people to row across the Arctic Ocean. Why? Read more »
Elliptical Mobile Solutions is hardly a household name in the data center world, but don’t bet against it. While bigger data centers seem to be better for webscale companies such as Google and Facebook, many are happy to grow about 105 cubic feet at a time. Read more »
Hadoop is on its way to becomig the de facto platform for the next-generation of data-based applications, but it’s not without some flaws. Ironically, one of Hadoop’s biggest shortcomings right now is also one of its biggest strengths going forward — the Hadoop Distributed File System. Read more »
The market for business analytics software grew 14 percent in 2011 and will hit $50.7 billion in revenue by 2016, according to IDC. The category will grow at a 9.8-percent-a-year rate until then, driven in part by the hype around big data. Read more »
The press might be preparing for a trial or big-dollar settlement in Ellen Pao’s sexual harassment case against venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, but her lawyers probably aren’t sleeping easy just yet. There are still two issues that could move the case to arbitration. Read more »
It looks like Microsoft is serious about becoming the operating system for cloud computing. At its Worldwide Partner Conference on Tuesday, the company announced what amounts to a white-label version of its Windows Azure cloud platform targeting current Windows Server-based web hosts. Read more »
Flash-based storage pioneer Fusion-io says it has developed a method for extending a system’s memory from DRAM into Fusion-io’s NAND-based storage tier, enabling the possibility of bigger, cheaper in-memory applications than are currently possible. Read more »
Law enforcement and other government bodies, it seems, aren’t shy about asking for or demanding data about users from wireless carriers. All told, wireless providers received more than 1.3 million requests for user data last year, and requests are increasing every year. Here are more details. Read more »
Hey, mobile developers, have you ever wondered where users are when they interact with your apps — like down to the level of whether they’re in a Starbucks or the McDonald’s right across the street? A startup called Placed can tell you so you can act accordingly. Read more »
Last week’s AWS outage outage might have outsmarted Netflix’s Chaos Monkeys, but the content-distribution giant isn’t about to turn its back on cloud computing. It was a relatively small blip in what has been better availability since the company made the move entirely to the cloud. Read more »
By becoming an underwriter for some of the world’s largest banks and credit card companies, ZestFinance might actually be able to achieve its goal of using big data to supply the underbanked with needed credit. It’s not altruism by any means, but here’s how it works. Read more »
AOL is taking its flexible infrastructure strategy to a whole new level of flexibility by building data centers that are about the size of French door refrigerators. Now, AOL will be able to deploy infrastructure where needed with little more than an electrical outlet required. Read more »
ZestCash, the startup co-founded by former Google CIO and VP of Engineering Douglas Merrill to provide short-term loans to the underserved, has changed its name to ZestFinance and its business model, as well. Now essentially an underwriting service for lenders, can ZestFinance remain ethical? Read more »
According to a couple of European researchers, governments that try to limit access to the Internet or social media during civil unrest can expect to see higher overall levels of violence with fewer calm periods than can governments that keep the web open. Read more »
The Mount Sinai School of Medicine is about to get a lesson in big data thanks to Cloudera Chief Scientist Jeff Hammerbacher. He’s partnering with the school’s clinical and academic faculty to develop new methods and systems for analyzing data in a variety of important areas. Read more »
Like it or not, sweeping software bugs are just part and parcel with operating the largest computing systems the world has ever seen. Although Amazon is already fixing the problems that caused its latest outage, this won’t be the last we see. Read more »
Twitter released its first-ever transparency report on Monday, which provides statistics on the number of times governments and individuals requested data on Twitter users or made takedown requests under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act during the first half of 2012. Read more »
VMware has acquired DynamicOps, a Burlington, Mass.-based cloud computing startup that spun out of banking giant Credit Suisse’s IT department in 2008. VMware is touting DynamicOps ability to manage resources running on Hyper-V- and Xen-based hypervisors, and Amazon EC2. Read more »
Cloud-based servers simple enough to be at the beck and call of every Joe Schmo are a compelling vision, but presently not a realistic one. At this point, in fact, one could argue that the holy grail of the consumer cloud has already been realized. Read more »
