July 2008
24 posts
Google Code Jam up and running on App Engine →
The Google Code Jam contest site contains a live scoreboard that is tracking the results for over 7000 contestants.
Perl Catalyst and Cloud Computing →
Lengthy interview with Perl developer Frank Speiser in which he discusses his soon-to-be-released Net::Cloud module.
How to do AVG and SUM in Google App Engine Data... →
App Engine Guy shows one way to do aggregate queries.
White Paper on 'Cloud Architectures' and Best... →
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),...
Google Teh Evil? Cloud economics, BigTable + GFS... →
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...
RumorMill: Microsoft to Rollout EC2 for Windows in... →
Reuven Cohen is hearing rumors that Microsoft is building an “EC2 for Windows” cloud offering.
Elasticfox vs Jollat →
John Willis compares two tools for managing Amazon Web Services: the Firefox extension ElasticFox, and a new standalone application, Jollat.
BulkDownload - gawsh - Google Code →
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.
Getting started with Zope on Google App Engine →
“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
Cloud Maturity Is Accelerating: More Than Just... →
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...
Google App Engine: no support, quotas, throttling…... →
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.
How to do some service discovery on Amazon EC2 →
Elastic Grid Blog discusses how they solve the problem of service discovery, without using an external service (like SimpleDB or a separate monitor process).
Google App Engine optimizations →
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.
Rich Wolsky on Eucalyptus: Open Source Cloud... →
Virtualization.com has an exclusive interview with Rich Wolski, Director of the Eucalyptus project.
Cloud Computing vs. Grid Computing →
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...
Scaling on EC2 →
WebMynd talks about how they utilize Amazon Web Services to scale up.
Announcing fofou - forum software for Google App... →
Krzysztof Kowalczyk announces his open-source forum software for Google App Engine whose interface is modeled on the Joel on Software Forums, which he considers to be vastly superior to the more common phpBB forums.
3 and 1/2 minutes to sort a Terabyte, and a look... →
Bill de hÓra notes that Hadoop has just set a record in the “annual general purpose (daytona) terabyte sort benchmark” and also provides an overview of how the Hadoop code is structured.
Sisense - An Analytics Dashboard for Amazon S3 →
Read Write Web profiles a new offering from Sisense, which aims to simplify Amazon S3 log analysis:
“Sisense aims to be the Google Analytics for Amazon S3 with it’s Prism dashboard by providing developers with a more visual interface. Best of all, it’s free.”
Google under pressure as App Engine requests rise →
An estimated 200,000 developers have Google App Engine accounts, and they are now clamoring for more features. Juan Carlos Perez quotes several developers and gets their take on what Google’s priorities should be.
Cloudsecurity.org Interviews Guido van Rossum:... →
One interesting tidbit from the interview: “Guido van Rossum’s involvement with the App Engine project was pretty late - the code ‘was almost ready for release’ when he get involved.”
The AppEngine Bulk Loader →
Helpful tips and tricks for using the Bulk Loader with Google App Engine, including how to use it as a Bulk Deleter and how to resume an interrupted bulk load.
Amazon: Hey Spammers, Get Off My Cloud! →
Brian Krebs writes that Amazon’s EC2 service is becoming a haven for spammers.
Dissecting SimpleDB BoxUsage →
“When Amazon launched their SimpleDB service, it looked like they had found a solution in BoxUsage:
As the website states, Amazon SimpleDB measures the machine utilization of each request and charges based on the amount of machine capacity used to complete the particular request […]
and reports back a BoxUsage value in every response returned by SimpleDB. Sadly, this...
June 2008
56 posts
I wish I could remove stars from certain feature... →
Jonathan Feinberg, creator of the very cool Google App Engine app Wordle, kicked off a lengthy debate on the App Engine mailing list this weekend by stating that Google engineers should focus on improving the existing service before adding additional language support.
“I can’t understand why the folks who have starred these issues don’t simply learn Python and start creating internet-scale...
Google App Engine →
Łukasz Maciak, inspired by a Steve Yegge blog post, talks about how Google App Engine is a first step to creating a sandboxed environment where hosting user scriptable Web apps is possible:
“This is the problem that Google App Engine solves. They are the few companies out there which figured out how to safely let people run arbitrary code on their servers without getting pwned by script...
Velocity 2008 →
Joe Heck sums up his impressions of the Velocity 2008 conference and pushes back on the “cloud computing” hype:
“Some of the key technologies to make applications that “just work” in a cloud computing environment nice and seamlessly just plain don’t exist as yet. Everything in current environments is still manual, and frankly pretty complex. The “shove it into the environment and...
STRUCTURE 08: Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO →
Liz Gannes from GigaOM has detailed notes from Werner Vogels keynote address at the Structure 08 conference.
Google AppEngine →
“I don’t think AppEngine is going to have much effect on mainstream web application hosting. The API is too constrained and for a company with resources the ties to Google are most likely too tight. So I predict AppEngine will be more of a muted success for Google. The infrastructure built for it will be useful internally, it will help them get more sites up more quickly addressing...
GigBlastr - an experimental Pylons app on Google... →
Nate Aune walks through building an app on Google App Engine with Pylons and the patched version of httplib.
Instrumentizing google appengine's datastore →
“You’ll find here a simple python module to use with the Google AppEngine SDK to monkey patch the datastore API in order to get an idea of the calls performed by your application.
perl-appengine →
New project to get Perl implemented as a supported language on Google App Engine
CloudStatus →
Real-time health status charts for Amazon Web Services.
Winning at the shell game: iPython on Google App... →
Aral Balkan shows you how to use the iPython shell with Google App Engine.
Cloud Values →
Randy Bias reminds us that cloud services are not just about scalability, but also provide the following value propositions: elasticity, speed, and reach.
JBoss Releases on Amazon EC2 →
Red Hat announced that their JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is available in beta form as a service within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).
Splunk Your Distributed Logs in EC2 →
“Managing logs is hard as it is, and now imagine you have several (dozen) servers in EC2, the process becomes a chore, the debugging is hard, and frustration abounds. To address this problem, I’ve setup Splunk to listen on a TCP port for any network traffic - if all others servers log to this host, then you will have a centralized, indexed log repository for all of your...
Service Monitoring Dashboards are mandatory for... →
“Google has a strong Web Operations culture, and there are numerous internal monitoring tools in use across the company, along with a smaller set available to customers. It’s suprising that Google launched a developer platform without providing something beyond an email group, although they are by no means the first to do so.”
— Jesse Robbins
App Engine outage today
→
Explanation of the datastore outage from the Google App Engine Team:
“This outage was the result of a bug in our datastore servers and was triggered by a particular class of queries. We have isolated the bug and we’re currently working on a fix. Going forward, we’re also working to further isolate queries so that in the future a bug like this won’t affect the stability of...
Google App Engine Goes Down and Stays Down →
Looks like Google App Engine is experiencing more down time today. According to Google engineers, “the errors are related to usage of the Datastore.”
Overview of Using Django on the Google App Engine →
Will Larson praises Google App Engine for its ease of deployment, and then discusses how Django on Google App Engine is different from Django with a relational database.
Google App Engine Downtime Notify |
Google... →
The Google datastore has experienced downtime for the past couple days. Keep an eye on this announcement list for further details.
Porting legacy databases to Google App Engine →
Thomas Brox Røst has a great tutorial on how to export a simple dataset from a a MySQL database and import it into the Google App Engine Datastore.
Working with Google App Engine Models (Google I/O... →
Rafe Kaplan gives practical examples of how to model one-to-many and many-to-many relationships with the Datastore, as well as showing how to overcome the limitations of the built-in count() function.
Under the Covers of the Google App Engine... →
Ryan Barrett’s talk is a must-see if you want to begin to understand how the Datastore works, why it has the limitations it does, and how it is built to scale.
Building Scalable Web Applications with Google App... →
Brett Slatkin’s talk was one of the highlights for me at Google IO. He covered the performance characteristics of writes and reads for the Datastore, and gave practical examples for how to best tackle common problems like counting and ordering entities with high write throughput.
Best Practices - Building a Production Quality... →
Ken Ashcraft’s talk has great tips on how to profile your code on a production site without impacting performance, and how to properly load test your Google App Engine app.
Engaging User Experiences with Google App Engine... →
John Skidgel and Lindsey Simon talk about how designers and developers can best work together to utilize Google App Engine.
Rapid Development with Python, Django, and Google... →
The Google IO videos and slides have been posted!
First up is Guido van Rossum talking about how to use the latest version of Django with Google App Engine.
Announcing Google App Engine Book →
Noah Gift and Mike Orr are writing a book focusing on Google App Engine. They plan to finish it by December 2008 or January 2009, and also have monthly PDF releases of each chapter as they finish them.