All Things Distributed
NOVEMBER 9, 2009
At the end of Q3 2009 we counted over 82 billion objects in Amazon S3. Congrats to the team for providing such a rock solid service! When looking at the graph keep in mind that the first 4 markers are a year apart, but the last one only 6 months.
The Agile Manager
DECEMBER 24, 2009
Michael Milken , the former junk bond king, has a charitable foundation. His foundation did some research a few years ago that determined that 70% of 7 chronic illnesses - things like diabetes, heart disease, lung cancer and so forth - are preventable through lifestyle change. They concluded that if people took better lifestyle decisions, doctors could focus their energies on enhancing and improving the quality and duration of life.
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Tim Kadlec
JULY 22, 2009
While browsing YouTube diligently working, I stumbled upon a video showing how to open a banana like a monkey. I like bananas, and who doesn’t like monkeys, so I gave it a watch. Turns out, I’ve been opening bananas the wrong way my entire life. Basically, for those of you who haven’t seen it, it shows how a typical person opens a banana using the stem.
All Things Distributed
OCTOBER 26, 2009
Today marks the launch of Amazon RDS - the Amazon Relational Database Service. Amazon RDS is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. Amazon RDS handles all the "muck" of relational database management freeing up its users to focus on their applications and business.
All Things Distributed
AUGUST 25, 2009
At this 3rd anniversary of the launch of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), it is amazing to see the impact this service has had on the industry. It is truly disruptive technology and its impact has reached far beyond a pure technology offering as the benefits of the cloud have changed the way we view IT Infrastructure.
All Things Distributed
JULY 13, 2009
Join recruiters and hiring managers from several of Amazon's global offices on July 14, 2009. We'll be in-world from 6am through midnight (Pacific/Seattle time) for the first ever Amazon Second Life Job Fair. This free event is a unique opportunity for candidates to have direct access to hiring managers and recruiters from around the world!
All Things Distributed
MAY 17, 2009
The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) embodies much of what makes infrastructure as a service such a powerful technology; it enables our customers to build secure, fault-tolerant applications that can scale up and down with demand, at low cost. Core in achieving these levels of efficiency and fault-tolerance is the ability to acquire and release compute resources in a matter of minutes, and in different Availability Zones.
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All Things Distributed
MARCH 11, 2009
Flexibility is a key advantage of using Amazon Web Services; you can obtain resources instantaneously without the headache of owning them. If you no longer need the resource, you release it and only pay for what you have used. This is a very powerful model that has helped many of our customers drive capital expense out of their IT operation.
All Things Distributed
DECEMBER 13, 2009
'All Things Distributed. Werner Vogels weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems. Expanding the Cloud - Amazon EC2 Spot Instances. By Werner Vogels on 13 December 2009 03:00 PM. | Permalink. | Comments (). Today we launched a new option for acquiring Amazon EC2 Compute resources: Spot Instances. Using this option, customers bid any price they like on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run those instances for as long their bid exceeds the current "Spot Price.
All Things Distributed
DECEMBER 3, 2009
'All Things Distributed. Werner Vogels weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems. Powerful New Amazon EC2 Boot Features. By Werner Vogels on 02 December 2009 05:00 PM. | Permalink. | Comments (). Today a powerful new feature is available for our Amazon EC2 customers: the ability to boot their instances from Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store).
All Things Distributed
DECEMBER 3, 2009
'All Things Distributed. Werner Vogels weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems. Expanding the Cloud - New AWS Region: US-West (Northern California). By Werner Vogels on 02 December 2009 05:00 PM. | Permalink. | Comments (). We have expanded the AWS footprint in the US and starting today a new AWS Region is available for use: US-West (Northern California).
All Things Distributed
SEPTEMBER 15, 2009
In the past week both Vivek Kundra, the U.S. CIO, and Casey Coleman, the CIO of the GSA, have made very strong statements in supporting the use of cloud computing to power Federal programs. A good example is today's announcement about apps.gov. In conversations with Vivek and Casey, I am struck every time by how much their observations that Federal CIOs are focused too much on infrastructure issues are similar to the observations within Amazon a number of years ago that motivated us to develop t
All Things Distributed
AUGUST 13, 2009
Ingrained in the DNA of the Amazon Technologist is a single-minded focus on the needs of our customers. The Amazon development process is even called "Working from the customer backwards". Essential in this process is a good understanding of what the customers need in terms of new services, new features for existing services, or different approaches to things that we are already doing.
All Things Distributed
MAY 20, 2009
Before networks were everywhere, the easiest way to transport information from one computer in your machine room was to write the data to a floppy disk, run to the computer and load the data there from that floppy. This form of data transport was jokingly called "sneaker net". It was efficient because networks only had limited bandwidth and you wanted to reserve that for essential tasks.
All Things Distributed
MARCH 25, 2009
Keeping your database simple and fast is often difficult if you use higher level frameworks such as ActiveRecords in Ruby or Java object persistence technologies such as Hibernate. There is a lot of magic that is happening out of sight that you have no control over. If you then have to scale your application it is often the relational database that these technologies require that becomes the performance and scaling bottleneck.
All Things Distributed
MARCH 2, 2009
Today we have some important news for our Amazon EC2 customers who are running Windows Server and Windows SQLServer instances and who have been looking to extend their coverage for fault-tolerance and locality reasons. Starting today Windows instances can be launched in an additional Availability Zone is the US and they can also be launched in two Availability Zones in Europe.
The Agile Manager
NOVEMBER 9, 2009
Up to this point in this series on Restructuring IT , we’ve looked at how IT has adopted an industrial model. IT has achieved scale, but at the cost of results, as is clear from the low rate of success of IT investments. We'll now take a look at how we can organize IT for results. Professional versus Industrial IT needs to reorganize for results, not scale.
The Agile Manager
OCTOBER 16, 2009
October is normally a heads-down month. In addition to being in the home stretch of meeting our yearly objectives, we must dedicate cycles to shaping, communicating and justifying our plans for next year. October is also a busy month for information sharing. The thoughts and ideas that have percolated through the year reach their maturity about this time, and we want to share them before everybody goes on their winter holidays.
The Agile Manager
SEPTEMBER 25, 2009
In previous installments of this series on restructuring IT , we looked at how IT has adopted industrial practices as it has gone in pursuit of scale. As a result, IT bears striking resemblance to Detroit automakers. Let's look at some common characteristics. Sub-Optimal Quality Detroit suffers its periodic crises of quality. There was a joke that made the rounds during the 1970s that you know you have an American car when you get the factory recall notice in the mail.
The Agile Manager
AUGUST 21, 2009
By going in pursuit of scale, we’ve created an IT function that is “too big to fail” in many businesses. Companies depend on IT – many can’t operate without it – yet they don’t really understand it. The result is moral hazard. Moral hazard is the proverbial “heads I win, tails you lose” scenario: a person takes boneheaded risks knowing that if they turn sour, somebody will come to their financial rescue.
The Agile Manager
JULY 22, 2009
The relationship between IT and its business partners is notoriously bad. Year after year, surveys by different research organizations report that improving that relationship is a top-10 priority for CIOs. But despite being a high priority for many years running, it hasn’t improved all that much. Before we can make any headway improving that relationship, we must first understand how IT's pursuit of scale is responsible for a lot of the dysfunction.
The Agile Manager
JUNE 29, 2009
Business is tough right now, and it’s going to be so for a while. In tough times, you want to be very good at what you do. The more “fighting fit” you are, the more likely you are to survive a challenge. Unfortunately, IT isn’t all that good at what it does. In fact, on the whole, it’s pretty bad. That means that IT isn’t very well prepared for this downturn.
Tim Kadlec
JUNE 25, 2009
Microsoft made great leaps forward with IE8, and just when I start thinking they deserve a nice pat on the back for embracing standards, they give me another reason to lose faith in them. The recent announcement is that Outlook 2010, like Outlook 2007, will use Microsoft Word for it’s rendering engine. No…you read that right…Word’s rendering engine.
Tim Kadlec
JUNE 17, 2009
Progressive enhancement is not only a smart idea, but it’s the right idea for anyone looking to produce cost-effective websites. It is alright if your site doesn’t look exactly the same in every browser. In fact, because of factors like font rendering, it’s impossible to maintain the exact same appearance across all browsers. Getting clients to accept that fact is important because it can save them both time and money (not to mention save you a few headaches).
The Agile Manager
MAY 13, 2009
Global business faces unprecedented changes. Earlier this year, I wrote in an article for alphaITjournal.com: Revenue forecasts aren’t materializing, capital structures are proving unsustainable, and operations are being scrutinized for inefficiencies. This, in turn, means that businesses are being completely restructured in how they are capitalized, organized, managed and governed.
Tim Kadlec
MAY 6, 2009
In Nate Koechley’s excellent talk on Frontend Engineering , he talks about the importance of building a “stronger DOM” By marking up your site with meaningful elements and attributes, you give your markup more value and provide a richer experience for both users and machines. In addition, a strong DOM provides you with numerous attributes and elements that you can make use of to style the content to your hearts desire.
Tim Kadlec
APRIL 22, 2009
Ideas and alibis are very much alike. Everyone has plenty of both. Some are good, and some are bad. The big difference is that while no one has a problem using alibis, very few are willing to consistently act on their ideas (me included). Excuses, Excuses. There are several reasons why people tend to pass on acting on their own ideas. Some of the major ones are fear of criticism, fear of failure, self-doubt, or the feeling that there is not enough time.
The Agile Manager
APRIL 14, 2009
In the prior installments of this series, we presented a pattern for how PMOs can better bridge the gap between executive and executor: First, we discussed the need to define progress in terms of business needs met and not technical tasks performed, so that we measure in terms of results, not effort. Next, we showed how we can track and forecast progress in these same terms – e.g., by using burn-up charts – so that we have unambiguous line-of-sight into what a team is actually doing.
Tim Kadlec
APRIL 13, 2009
Who Wrote It? Object-Oriented Javascript is written by Stoyan Stefanov, a web developer at Yahoo. Stoyan’s thoughts on all things web can be found at phpied.com. He also runs a blog on iPhone development , and a site dedicated to Javascript design patterns at JSPatterns.com (it’s been quiet for quite awhile now, but I’m hoping to see it brought out of retirement).
Tim Kadlec
APRIL 8, 2009
It’s April. The weather is starting to get nicer, Easter is around the corner…and hundreds of people are going streaking! No, you don’t have to be nervous about heading outside today. This kind of streaking is completely un-offensive (hopefully). Once again it’s time for the annual CSS Naked Day. CSS Naked Day is a way of promoting web standards by stripping off all the CSS on a site to show that by structuring your HTML in a way that is semantic and makes sense, your co
Tim Kadlec
APRIL 2, 2009
I started working on a recap post of this year’s SXSW, and every time I did, it turned into a short novel. There’s a lot of exciting stuff that goes on there. Since few people, other than say…my mother, want to read about my trip in that much detail, I thought I should trim it down. So here is my recap, in 350 words or less: SXSW 2009.
Tim Kadlec
MARCH 23, 2009
As you may remember, secondary education for web development and design is something that interests me greatly. I’ve mentioned before that the curriculum taught in most colleges tends to be dated and in need of definite help. Opera published their Web Standards Curriculum , and that was a great step in the right direction, but The Web Standards Project (WaSP) has taken it to an all new level with their recently launched InterAct Curriculum.
Tim Kadlec
MARCH 19, 2009
One of the highlights of SXSW this year for me personally, was being able to see a panel with Andy Budd of Clearleft , a person and company for whom I have the utmost respect. The panel was about usability testing and the tools you can use to better know your users, but one of the major takeaways I got had more to do with how to approach your job in general.
The Agile Manager
MARCH 16, 2009
The last piece of the Agile PMO puzzle is to make the data needs of the PMO non-burdensome to delivery teams. It’s all well and good to be able to get quality and performance data, but it has to be easily accessible. If it isn't, we're just taxing the teams that much more. That means we won't get this data timely or efficiently, if at all. Automating Metrics Capture Because they're derived directly from the asset under development, our metrics give us an objective way to index and monitor qualit
Tim Kadlec
MARCH 5, 2009
Last year I attended SXSW for the first time. I had said that I would try to recap the conference, but never really did that. Best laid plans of mice and men and all that. I haven’t really attended any other major conferences, so I don’t have much to compare it with, but the experience was fantastic. So fantastic, in fact, that thanks to the generosity of my employer and a little good luck, I am going to be attending again this year.
Tim Kadlec
MARCH 5, 2009
Things have been a bit silent around here lately, but I feel for a pretty good reason. As many of you who are on Facebook or Twitter no doubt already know, on February 7th my wife and I had our first child, a little baby girl. Little is a bit relative here…Naomi Adalyn was an ounce shy of 9 lbs and was 21” long. I wanted to get this post up a bit earlier, but as you can probably guess, she’s kept us quite busy.
Tim Kadlec
FEBRUARY 25, 2009
Who Wrote It? SocialCorp is written by Joel Postman, currently the Chief Enterprise Social Business Strategist at Intridea , a social app development company. Joel frequently blogs on social media marketing and other related topics at www.socializedpr.com. What’s Covered? In today’s web, a company’s online presence extends far beyond their website.
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