Feedly has faced two outages since adding millions of users in the wake of the announcement that Google will retire its Google Reader service. Now Feedly is accelerating its monetization plans. Read more »
Database startup Drawn to Scale has extended its Spire distributed data platform from SQL to MongoDB. That means users can get high performance from the latter even across hundreds of terabytes. Read more »
China’s big four internet companies are big — huge, in fact — but they’re not yet technological innovators like their American counterparts. However, scalability is an an issue that knows no borders, which has spurred some cross-continental cooperation. Will it also inspire a Chinese tech awakening? Read more »
Startups and enterprises alike face barriers when it comes to cloud adoption. This includes security, speed of access to cloud resources, and runaway network costs. However, multiple solutions for direct access are being provided to address this issue for companies big and small. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The growth of public and private cloud services places new demands on the IT organization, particularly when it comes to the scale, agility and management of the data center. SDNs are a response to those demands, providing opportunities for IT managers to improve their network operations. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Facebook has open sourced a new system called Corona for scheduling and managing Hadoop jobs. Corona attempts to do away with many of the problems that come along with massive-scale Hadoop operations, and soon looks to take Facebook’s Hadoop deployment beyond just MapReduce. Read more »
Hosted memcached provider MemCachier is expanding like crazy, moving from its homebase on Heroku into the AppFog, CloudBees, DotCloud and Amazon EC2 platforms. It’s impressive growth for a bootstrapped company that launched in April and was little more than an idea a year ago. 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 »
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 »
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 »
This week’s announcement by Google of its new Compute Engine cloud offering is a big deal, but most commentators are missing the real reason Google will get some stalwart Amazon customers to give Compute Engine a try. Performance, not scale, could be Google’s real differentiator. Read more »
Updated: Twitter has shared numerous aspects of its infrastructure over the past few years, and its decision to open source its work on MySQL might be the social media platform’s most useful contribution yet. Sure, open source big data tools are valuable, but they’re not MySQL. Used […] Read more »
OMGPOP can thank the cloud for its acquisition by Zynga on Wednesday. The gaming startup, whose Draw Something iPhone used cloud computing and a NoSQL database to scale from zero (relatively speaking) to more than 35 million downloads in three weeks and never miss a beat. Read more »
Cloud computing, mobile computing and the consumerization of IT are changing the game for IT departments. Section one of our three-part report describes and quantifies each of these trends, demonstrating that they are real now, growing rapidly and perilous to ignore. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Cloud computing consultancy Cloudscaling is realigning its business around the open-source OpenStack framework, and it has a message for the world: If you want to use open-source software but operate like Amazon Web Services, we’re your man. Read more »
If you are looking to cloud computing to simplify your IT environment, I’m afraid I have bad news for you. For every problem eliminated by choosing cloud, it just creates more problems you remain accountable for— and perhaps some that you never had to face before. Read more »
At last week’s MongoSV conference in Santa Clara, Calif., a number of users shared their experiences with the MongoDB NoSQL database. One common theme: NoSQL is necessary for a lot of use cases, but it’s not for companies afraid of hard work. Read more »
Facebook held a Tech Talk on Monday night explaining how it built a MySQL environment capable of handling everything the company needs in terms of scale, performance and availability. Based on what I heard, it looks like critics of Facebook’s MySQL environment might be wrong. Read more »
Targeting customers demanding more-reliable and efficient Hadoop clusters to power their big data efforts, NetApp has partnered with Cloudera to deliver a Hadoop storage system called the NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop. It combines Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution and management software with a NetApp-built RAID architecture. Read more »
Earlier this year, rumors swirled about whether Twitter had actually moved into a new Utah data center, or if it was forced to move its operations to a different facility. Now there are reports that Twitter is leasing more data center space, this time in Atlanta. Read more »
When you’re running a large web infrastructure, automation is critical to ensure that administrators aren’t spending their every waking seconds putting dealing with downed servers. Google, Yahoo and other pioneers had to figure out how to automate failover in their data centers. Now it’s Facebook’s turn. Read more »
Google, which serves about 7 percent of the world’s overall web traffic, isn’t any ordinary company. Google Research Director Peter Norvig recently shared some of the considerations that Google takes into account when designing its infrastructure and systems to operate at Internet scale. Read more »
Two weeks ago, a post quoting Michael Stonebraker, who questioned the relevance of MySQL and Facebook’s use of it, sparked an overwhelmingly negative response. The true state of the database market appears to be that while SQL has its place, ideal uses are fading fast. Read more »
Among the biggest problems with developing applications for the cloud is scaling the database layer. GenieDB, a competitor in our recent Structure 2011 LaunchPad competition, wants to give its customers the benefits of both SQL and NoSQL to scale across data centers. Read more »
GoGrid CEO John Keagy wrote on his blog yesterday that when it comes cloud computing, things such as cheap hydroelectric power and massive-scale data centers are overrated. His theory doesn’t make sense for every cloud provider, but he does make some good points. Read more »
Nutanix startup that sells an appliance combining computing and storage on the same nodes, has raised $13.2 million. The company is developing an appliance combining computing and storage on the same server nodes, a story that should resonate with customers concerned with scalability and performance. Read more »
Cloud computing represents a fundamental technical and business trend, but there are barriers in cloud computing that limit broad cloud-based deployment of scaled enterprise-class services. Hybrid clouds will overcome some of these barriers, but the future requires improvements in cloud architectures and virtualization technologies. Read more »
Database startup Clustrix revealed the identities of four customers today, strong evidence that there’s something to its webscale SQL database beyond the $30 million investment that Clustrix has raised thus far. The customers announced are AOL, Photobox, Box.net and iOffer. Read more »
Depending on how Facebook intends to evolve, both performance considerations and data privacy laws might make additional infrastructure investment a good idea. Regardless of its rationales, however, the time to do so is now — before the company goes public and must answer for every dollar spent. Read more »
Today’s links demonstrate that there’s a long way to go before we have issues like cloud computing and web infrastructure figured out, but also that we’re making progress: Twitter teaches lessons on scaling, Google runs test queries, and IBM Research is tackling cloud privacy. Read more »
The analogy goes that with more organizations hosting applications in the cloud and data volumes skyrocketing, the cloud data center takes the place of the on-premise server. And if the data center is the server, the cloud computing management software, atop which applications run, must ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The analogy goes that with more organizations hosting applications in the cloud, and with data volumes skyrocketing, the data center takes the place of the on-premise server. If that’s the case, the cloud computing management software must be the new operating system, so scalability is critical. Read more »
With EMC in talks to buy Isilon and news of Dell’s DCS business only getting better, the future is all about lots and lots of cheap boxes. And speaking of the future, will all the post-M&A integration leave “supervendors” hamstrung as IT passes them by? Read more »
Commercial Hadoop champion Cloudera is building a connector to enable movement of data between Netezza’s data warehousing appliance and Cloudera’s Hadoop clusters. It’s just the latest instance of an analytics vendor integrating Hadoop support, and further evidence that Hadoop has legs as a commercial technology. Read more »
Last year, the Structure conference confirmed my beliefs that the community had moved beyond asking what cloud computing is, and was moving toward asking how users can best leverage it. This year, I learned even ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Talk of data centers can be equal parts fascinating and mind-numbing; speculating about what new data centers signify, however, is nothing short of riotous. And, this week, Apple and Facebook gave us plenty to talk about. Facebook emerged as the mystery Company X building a large ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Common scalability-related failures include thinking scalability is just about technology, inappropriate use of databases, and more. Here are the 10 most common scalability killers that we see, particularly in early stage startups — and the ones we believe are the most important to avoid. Read more »
Java scalability specialist Terracotta has acquired the intellectual property associated with Quartz, a popular open-source job scheduler, part of Terracotta’s mission to integrate common open-source Java application components into its middleware solution. Terracotta has already integrated SQL-query service Hibernate, and it acquired popular distributed caching solution […] Read more »
Just like with golf, technology is as much about ensuring that your bad hits are recoverable as it is ensuring that you make great ones. Here are 10 common mistakes made during platform development — and the ones we believe are the most important to avoid. Read more »
