GigaOM contributor James Urquhart shares some of the best books, blogs and other information on the concepts of devops and complex IT systems. Read more »
A California company is building out a distributed computing operation across connected devices in a small Canadian city, but technical challenges could stand in the way. Read more »
James Urquhart continues his look into whether companies sacrifice stability by designing systems that value adaptability over strict top-down command and control. This is called the stability-resiliency tradeoff and, he argues, many complex systems benefit from adaptability. Read more »
SevOne has raised $150 million for its line of appliances that help companies capture and analyze their streams of operational infrastructure data. Its financial success, even for a relatively quiet company founded in 2005, illustrate how important it is to know your systems data well. Read more »
As our compute infrastructure becomes more distributed it’s much harder to keep everything synced. But with users demanding immediate access to their files, photos and whatnot all around the world, solutions like Google’s Spanner DB and Twitters photo blobstore are a solution. Read more »
Building a robotic bee that acts like a real bee is a lot more complicated than programming a robot to fly around from flower to flower. A project called Green Brain aims to build an artificial intelligence system that can actually mimic a bee’s brain. Read more »
Cloud computing and distributed applications are part of a greater shift to building out an ecosystem with inter-dependent parts. This may seem obvious, but what is less obvious is how the industry will interoperate and develop systems that let information flow through the ecosystem. Read more »
Let’s assume that sometime in the future every car has Wi-Fi and every car has a cellular data connection. Wi-Fi is essentially free, while cellular data is expensive. Is there a way to maximize the “free” connectivity of Wi-Fi while minimizing the costs of mobile data? Read more »
As datasets get fatter and cumbersome, it’s becoming harder to move them around. Even the fattest pipes look like cocktail straws when you’re talking about petabyte databases. It’s getting more and more difficult to move these massive troves of data to the applications that use them. Read more »
The great things about open source software stacks is that they’re free and they work. The not-so-great thing is that — like many open source projects — they can be difficult to configure and manage. Luckily, hardware vendors are stepping in to fill the void. Read more »
