tomtzigt

Amazon Silk Content Delivery Networks, and WAN optimization, provided a generic acceleration solution to get common content closer to the client device, but on mobile devices the delivery performance of the last mile was still a problem. Many websites still do not have mobile optimized content, and sucking down a 3Mpixel JPG and render it on a 320x240 pixel display is just plain wrong. With the introduction of Amazon Silk, which uses the cloud to aggregate, cache, precompile, and predict, the... Read Full Story

The Semantic Web captures the semantics, or meaning, of data, and machines are enabled to interact with that meta data. It is an idea of WWW pioneer Tim Berners-Lee who observed that although search engines index much of the Web's content, keywords can only provide an indirect association to the meaning of the article's content. He foresees a number of ways in which developers and authors can create and use the semantic web to help context-understanding programs to better serve knowledge... Read Full Story

Firing up a 1000 processor deep analytics cluster in the cloud to solve a market segmentation question regarding your customer orders during Christmas 2010, or a sentiment analysis of your company's facebook fan page now costs less than having lunch in Palo Alto. The cloud effectively provides infinite computes, and to some degree infinite storage, although the costs of non-ephemeral storage might murk that analogy up a bit. So what would you do differently now you have access to a global... Read Full Story

With the explosion of data and the need to make sense out of it all on a smart phone is creating an interesting opportunity. Mobile devices need high performance at low power, and Apple seems to be the only one that has figured out that having your own processor team and IP is actually a key advantage. And the telcos will need Petascale data centers to manage content, knowledge management, and operational intelligence and the performance per Watt of general purpose CPUs from IBM, Intel, and... Read Full Story

I am a big fan of DropBox as it makes cloud storage as easy to use as a local folder. The additional features of version control, and P2P so that syncs between desktops and laptops are lightning fast are simple brilliantly executed: easy to use and worry free. However, at $200 a year for 100GByte it simply is too expensive for use as a real cloud storage/back up/access everywhere kinda solution. Desktops have been in the 1TB range for some time and thus a cloud solution that can't handle that... Read Full Story

Today, Rackspace open sourced its cloud platform and announced to create a collaborative effort that includes NASA, Citrix, and Dell to build an open source cloud platform, dubbed OpenStack . Finally, the world of cloud computing gets some weight behind a potential standard. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and big SaaS players like Salesforce.com and Netsuite are getting too isolated and too powerful to be believable to drive any type of standard for interoperability in the cloud. An open source... Read Full Story

Found a wonderful post by Greg Papadopoulos in which he postulates the trend towards interclouds . Greg argues that Amazon's AWS BYOS/IaaS (Bring Your Own Stack) is the perfect marriage of simplicity and functionality that it will be with us for a long time. SaaS is the new delivery norm of software, and PaaS is the needed productivity layer to hide the complexity of IaaS. The proliferation of SaaS on top of PaaS on top of IaaS is the wrath of early technology adoption when most of the... Read Full Story

Amazon.com attempts IT switch to cloud computing Amazon's e-commerce site is planning to move into Amazon Web Services. Jen Boden is Amazon's e-commerce IT director. "Boden said her organization is in the preliminary stages of moving into AWS -- she started with some simple, homegrown applications, such as a list maintained for HR, which her team moved to AWS successfully. Larger sections of IT operations will move later with the financials likely to be last, since they are the most sensitive... Read Full Story

As an engineer I frequently look towards biology to get inspired or get ideas how complex systems need to be put together to stand the test of time. In this quest, I came across a wonderful article from a Yale research team that compared the transcriptional regulatory network of a bacterium to the call graph of the Linux operating system. “It is a commonplace metaphor that the genome is the operating system of a living organism. We wanted to see if the analogy actually holds up,” said Mark... Read Full Story

With governmental data being pushed into the public cloud, APIs to access them are rapidly proliferating. The Guardian has set up a portal that allows users to search through the governmental data of the UK, US, Australia, and New Zealand and see how countries compare. There is also an active quest for good visualizations and the portal solicits its users to suggest visualizations. One that caught my eye is called the-billion-dollar-gram which visualizes the relative budget size of programs... Read Full Story