Amazoogle News

The Google Code Jam contest site contains a live scoreboard that is tracking the results for over 7000 contestants.

Lengthy interview with Perl developer Frank Speiser in which he discusses his soon-to-be-released Net::Cloud module.

App Engine Guy shows one way to do aggregate queries.

New White paper from Amazon that discusses best practices for building applications in the Cloud:

“Cloud Architectures are Services-Oriented Architectures that are designed to use On-demand infrastructure more effectively. Applications built on Cloud Architectures are such that the underlying computing infrastructure is used only when it is needed (for example to process a user request), draw the necessary resources on-demand (like compute servers or storage), perform a specific job, then relinquish the unneeded resources after the job is done. While in operation the application scales up or down elastically based on actual need for resources. Everything is automated and operates without any human intervention.”

Can European companies store data in US data centers, or is that against EU law? Can Google accomodate European companies by segregating data geographically, or are they architecting their data storage system to be one global system?

Mark Masterson explores the tension between national privacy laws and global cloud computing systems, and contrasts the different approaches that Google and Amazon are taking.

Reuven Cohen is hearing rumors that Microsoft is building an “EC2 for Windows” cloud offering.

John Willis compares two tools for managing Amazon Web Services: the Firefox extension ElasticFox, and a new standalone application, Jollat.

Lack of a bulk data exporter is widely recognized as one of the biggest limitations of Google App Engine.  Garrett Davis has attempted to plug that gap with gawsh, his new bulk download tool.  He’s quick to point out some of its current limitatations: it can’t handle reference properties, list data, and blobs.  Also, strings must be ASCII.

“Thanks to a patch published by Kapil Thangavelu, it’s quite straight-forward to get set up to use Zope on Google’s App Engine.”

— Malthe Borch

James Staten from Forrester Research rounds up some recent announcements and opines that cloud computing is a trend that’s here to stay:

“It’s still early days and we certainly aren’t seeing the type of enterprise implementations we would expect to signal a high growth phase, but it’s starting to look like cloud computing may have greater legs than the utility computing efforts that came before it.”

Aral Balkan makes some good points in a lengthy post where he details his frustrations with Google App Engine’s quotas and the non-responsiveness of the Google App Engine team.

Elastic Grid Blog discusses how they solve the problem of service discovery, without using an external service (like SimpleDB or a separate monitor process).

Niall Kennedy shares some best practices for App Engine development, including data optimization tips for Google’s hosted Bigtable instance, ways to reduce the errors and resource usage of your application, and what steps you should add to your deployment checklist.

Virtualization.com has an exclusive interview with Rich Wolski, Director of the Eucalyptus project.

Thorsten von Eicken talks about the distinction between grid computing (which is concerned with batch processing) and cloud computing (which is concerned with on-demand resource allocation). As he puts it in a later comment to his blog post:

“The most fundamental principle in cloud computing is being able to bring the next server from boot into full production on auto-pilot. This solves many problems, from repairing failures, to scaling up and down with load, to launching additional deployments for special purposes (staging, demo, test, etc). The notion that when you need additional resources you go and get them is different. It doesn’t exist in batch processing.”