“As soon as you say, “failure is not an option,” you’ve just said, “innovation is not an option.”
—Seth’s Blog: The flip side
April 2011
Yottaa Uses the Cloud to Boost Site Speed: Cloud Computing News « →
gigaom.com
Yottaa’s service highlights one of the big sweet spots for cloud computing, which is the ability for startups to compete with CDNs and other service providers without having to build their own infrastructure. By writing smart software and leveraging cloud providers’ already-built infrastructure, companies such as Yottaa can keep their overhead down, which results a lower cost service for customers, too.
“For the first couple of days of the tour, the towns we were playing were in Alabama, Florida, Tennessee—this was the black South. We expected to hear boos, so we were reluctant to be on the side of the stage, to see them get disappointed. But then from the dressing room, we’d hear “Yeaaaaaah! Yeaaahhh!” It was the black audience, praising these dudes. The reason they were so good: It wasn’t white punk rockers trying to be black emcees. They wasn’t talking about gold chains or Cadillacs. They were white rappers rapping about what they did. Real recognize real.”
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DMC on the reaction of fans to their opening act, the Beastie Boys.
Whether your customers are club kids at a concert or cubicle cowboys at a big company, real recognizes real.
Either you understand the problems they want solved or you don’t. Either they relate to and get value from the services you create or they won’t.
Among the greats in music, marketing, business or entrepreneurship there’s no faking it. Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Bill Campbell, Larry Ellison- love them or hate them they keep it real. And real recognizes real.
(via brycedotvc)
“Ahoy hoy and welcome to the newly minted Twilio engineering blog! We the Twilio engineering team will be sharing some of the unique challenges we face bridging the 100-year-old world of realtime telecom with the world of HTTP and the web. Using cloud infrastructure to implement a communications platform has required us to build a highly automated, self-healing distributed platform that can be deployed across thousands of servers.”
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If the post re AWS EBS failure is any indication, this is gonna be a great blog.
“If you ever see public benchmarks of AWS that only use m1.small, they are useless, it shows that the people running the benchmark either didn’t know what they were doing or are deliberately trying to make some other system look better. You cannot expect to get consistent measurements of a system that has a very high probability of multi-tenant interference.”
—Adrian Cockcroft’s Blog: Understanding and using Amazon EBS - Elastic Block Store
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As Little’s Law implies, system architects look for the queues in any system and apply technology to reduce the bottlenecks. Fusion-io, and maybe some other vendors in this space (e.g. Oracle) have it right. They understand that it’s not about hardware, rather the secret is in IP that allows systems to read and write directly from the processor to flash in a single pass with no cumbersome, multi-phase commits required in traditional storage, file system and database protocols.
A leading example is Fusion-io’s Virtual Storage Layer (VSL), which is like IBM mainframe MVS (Multiple Virtual Storage) architecture. Essentially this resource creates 2TB blocks of virtual addressable data, meaning you can design terabytes of address space that scale to incredible levels (i.e. address space limitations are blown away). This is achieved with a combination of flash controller architecture and server software that provides multiple virtual address spaces to be mapped onto a log-structured flash memory. This allows the processor to store data ‘synchronously’ to flash – once the write is complete it is guaranteed to be written to persistent flash.
From a software point of view, VSL provides a large virtual resource that enables designers to get rid of 99% of the IOPs. And as the saying goes, “the best I/O is no I/O.” The remaining 1% of I/O will use the traditional high capacity disk storage shared over storage networks within the data center and in the cloud.
” —What Storage Folks Do Not Get About Fusion-io - Wikibon
“In such a model, the controller acts as a software defined network provisioning system, programming the switches via an open API with L2 and L3 forwarding information, and continually updating upon changes. The controller knows the topology, L2 or L3, and knows the devices attached to the topology and their identities (IP/MAC addresses). The burdening process of ARP gleans or managing hundreds and hundreds of routing protocol adjacencies and messages is offloaded to the controller, while the millions of new flows per second are forwarded immediately by each switch, without delay. Traditional routing protocols and spanning tree could go away as we know it, with the controller having a universal view of the topology, much like OpenFlow. The message bus between switch and controller still exists however the number of flows and flow granularity are of no concern. Only new and changed L2 or L3 forwarding information traverses the message bus (along with other management data perhaps). This too is also a form of Software Defined Networking (SDN), in my humble opinion.”
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On data center scale, OpenFlow, and SDN
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Oh now that is an interesting [sub]control/data split brain idea.
“2. The startup community understands some companies will fail, and so when one does, their second thought is “let’s go hire that company’s best engineers/PMs/sales people/recruiters” rather than “well, those people all screwed up. Suckers!” (The first thought is often “that’s unfortunate for them.”)”
—Kidogo : Joining a startup versus joining startups
