All Things Distributed

JULY 21, 2007

2.223 million pre-orders on our sites world-wide. 1.4 million on Amazom.com alone. These orders trickled in over the period of 5.5 months, but from a distributed systems perspective today is the day as these orders go en-masse from pre-orders to orders, being charged and delivered. It is one smooth operation. The planning for single day delivery is truly impressive, especially on the supply-chain, transportation and fulfillment side where we need to do this without impacting the regular delivery

Transportation 78

Transportation Systems 78

The Agile Manager

JULY 29, 2007

Demand for IT in business continues to rise. Looking backward, over the last 10 years the IT market has absorbed the new capacity in Asia and South America, yet still we find global and national/regional IT employment is up since 2000. 1 Looking forward, all indications are that demand will continue to rise. More importantly, there are very strong indicators that IT will increasingly be a strategic capability: the forecasted increase in worldwide investable assets is creating demand for new sell

Government 40

Government Open Source Latency Code 40

All Things Distributed

JULY 11, 2007

I was putting together a short panel presentation on the role of a Chief Technology Officer in corporate innovation and I once again realized that there is quite a bit of confusion around the role of the CTO. The first thing that always comes up when you want to discuss the role of a CTO is that there is no well established definition of what a CTO actually does.

Innovation 65

Innovation Technology Technology 65

All Things Distributed

JULY 19, 2007

When I was building one of my first teams at Amazon, one that had to work on some really advanced distributed systems technology I put up a job description on this weblog. I was certainly pleased with the responses. Last year at a conference I heard from some of my former academic colleagues that they were using this description to educate their students abput where they were lacking in knowledge or experience.

Engineering 60

Engineering Education Technology Technology 60

All Things Distributed

JULY 23, 2007

The august edition of Wired has a long article on the disappearance of Jim Gray, earlier this year. Steve Silberman worked diligently on this article and interviewed many people including Donna Carnes, Jim’s wife. I like the article because it focuses more on Jim as the technologist, friend and mentor than on the technicalities of the search after his disappearance.

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All Things Distributed

JULY 10, 2007

I omitted the Dynamo reference from the previous collection, but now that the SOSP program is live: Guiseppe DeCandia, Deniz Hastorun, Madan Jampani, Gunavardhan Kakulapati, Avinash Lakshman, Alex Pilchin, Swami Sivasubramanian, Peter Vosshall and Werner Vogels, “Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-Value Store”, to appear in the Proceedings of the 21st ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Stevenson, WA, October 2007.

Operating System 60

Operating System Programming Availability Systems 60

All Things Distributed

JULY 6, 2007

I recently gave a few talks in which I gave some reading advice to the audience and I promised to follow-up with posting the links here. The first article is the interview of Michael Stonebraker by Margo Seltzer in the May/June edition of ACM Queue (unfortunately the article is online yet, but this link seems to work thanks to Peter O’Kelly).

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