More web-infrastructure Stories
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google dc
photo: Google

Google spent more than a billion dollars on infrastructure in the fourth quarter, representing the company’s second-biggest quarterly expenditure ever. As it competes against Facebook, Apple, Yelp and Amazon, the company can’t afford to stop building data centers now. Read more »

tencent

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 »

Apple's massive solar farm in North Carolina, photo by WCNC-TV
photo: WCNC-TV

Much of the data center industry is upset about a recen report exposing some wasteful energy practices. However, eBay’s Dean Nelson says the data center industry isn’t perfect and it’s up to companies like his to lead the charge on bringing everyone else up to speed. Read more »

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Etsy shared the details of its hardware architecture on Friday, showing the world a whole lot of Supermicro servers running everything from web servers to Hadoop. At this point, software is the name of the game at webscale, so hardware openness is just welcome community service. Read more »

monkey

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 »

hardhat

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 »

Subscriber Content

gigaompromasterimagecloud

In cloud and big data, the second quarter of 2012 featured several high-profile deals and product launches that could reshape the marketplace for everyone. Google and Microsoft launched Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings, software-defined networking took off, and all eyes stayed fixed on the continuing promise of data analytics. Read more at GigaOM Pro »

elephant walking away

For better or worse, Hadoop has become synonymous with big data. In just a few years it has gone from a fringe technology to the de facto standard. But is the enterprise buying into a technology whose best day has already passed? Read more »

nibiru

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 »

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Lest storage vendors thought they were immune to disruption that open source hardware is having on the server industry, Netflix’s new Open Connect content-delivery network might make them think again. It’s inspired by open source storage designs first released by Backblaze almost three years ago. Read more »

gold tidal wave

10gen, the creator and commercial entity behind the popular MongoDB database has raised another $42 million and wants to take the technology to an application near you. The money will help 10gen double down on research and development to make MongoDB live up to its hype. Read more »

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Facebook’s hyperinflated valuation heading into its IPO has everything to do with its promise, and very little to do with its actual profits. Here are some numbers we know about Facebook’s infrastructure that speak to its promise perhaps as much as its 900 million users. Read more »

hadoop

As the world once again starts analyzing Yahoo’s myriad woes after Sunday morning’s ouster of embattled CEO Scott Thompson, I’m left wondering if its investment in Hadoop didn’t aid in the company’s demise, even if it’s a way down the long list of Yahoo’s mistakes. Read more »

parachute

If you think about it, Netflix’s metamorphosis into a company that runs its infrastructure completely atop cloud-based resources is truly remarkable. For many companies, such as site-optimization and CDN provider Yottaa, the bigger they get, the harder it is to justify the cloud’s cost and performance. Read more »

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