Gigaom (highly recommended for their frequent high quality posts on cloud computing) posts about the Dell/Wikia spat over upgrading hard drives in their servers.

The Wikia system is an excellent candidate for moving to the cloud. Wikia’s system is only 250 servers. There are much larger systems running on AWS. I’m sure they have the same kinds of concerns that we did at Melodeo when we first moved to AWS. We had to do a moderate amount of work on our solution to get it to work well. A common issue with a system transition is database utilization, as it is common for a self-built data center solution to feature a few very large servers for database (typically MySQL), and then a lot of the more cost efficient mid-range servers for components that are easy to distribute – software like Apache and memcache. In those days, the largest AWS instance was smaller than our big datacenter servers.

However, since the time we had to do some work to get our MySQL implementation optimized, AWS has introduced much larger instance sizes (with much better IO), and RDS.

Having to be worrying about hard drive upgrades in your racks of servers just isn’t as much fun as it used to be.
Rather than fight with Dell, why not offload that worry to someone else?

-bw

I’ll be speaking at the Seattle AWS User’s Group this evening on our experiences at Melodeo with cloud computing on AWS. Primarily I’ll be talking about scalable transcoding in the cloud. If you want to do mobile streaming right, you end up supporting a lot of formats, as both devices and networks conspire to make life difficult. Lots of formats means lots of transcoding…. hope to see you there.

http://www.sawsug.com/

-bw

If you want to see just how differentiated you can be by doing your heavy lifting very efficiently, check out these videos showing inside Google’s data centers. This is what you are competing with if you run your own servers…

I’ll be speaking at the WTIA Cloud Computing & Web Services Community Meeting January 19 starting at 6pm. The meeting is at F5 Networks in Seattle. I’ll be talking about my experiences with cloud computing and mobile application development on the nuTsie product.

If you aren’t familiar with cloud computing generally or the AWS product specifically, I’ll be providing an intro. I’ll also be doing a deeper dive into some particular technical areas of interest, so there should be plenty of interest for everyone.

-bw

I’m not just a cloud blogger… I work every day on the nuTsie media cloud computing platform, and we just introduced our latest cloud-based media product (nuTsie runs on AWS). Very nice article at CNET on the new product:

Nutsie brings iTunes to Android via the cloud

Matt’s blog on music and technology is terrific. Given the convergence of cloud computing and digitial media generally, I’m sure we’ll be seeing more cloud coverage from him in the future.

-bw

As is traditional, I now present my predictions for 2010.

• Apple Lala acquisition having telegraphed Apple’s intentions, 2010 becomes the year of the media cloud. Further consolidation in the space precipitated as the big players further consolidate the space, needing to acquire rather than build from scratch. Google, Nokia, and Amazon, and RIM all make acquisitions in this space.
• 2010 won’t yet be the year of the smartbook, but the market is starting to get serious about them. What makes this a cloud prediction? Smart books will be cloud-powered, not just always-connected netbooks not running Windows.  Cloud power is a necessary component to enable the smartbook experience, especially with media, which is so consumptive of storage.
• Amazon announced spot pricing for EC2 instances. This isn’t really the open market for cloud computing cycles, as Amazon sets the bottom price. Amazon (the leader in this kind of thinking, clearly) takes the final step during 2010 and lets the market determine the pricing.
• Database vendors – especially Oracle – introduce their own cloud-based database services to compete more directly with Amazon’s RDS.
• Microsoft should marry Azure + Zune for their own media cloud solution, but won’t get it done. Microsoft ends up making an acquisition in cloud-based media as well.
• Several companies (startups most likely) – take commodity computing back to something that has been tried before but not yet been a huge commercial success: Cycle stealing/renting from consumer PCs and paying the owners. This time around, the platforms are getting more standarized, as is the pricing.  If your applications are architected to take advantage of a service like Amazon Spot pricing, chances are you could use a consumer-hardware-based service.
• Contrary to common expectation, Google does not introduce a general purpose compute or storage platform, but keeps their play in the market to cloud-based applications.

Happy New Year!

-bw

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I’ve just introduced some new resource pages. Organization of these pages is still a work in progress (feedback welcome), here is the initial layout.

• Cloud Blogs: For blogs that may feature cloud topics as well as other topics, links are to the cloud category where possible. Also where appropriate, I’ve split blogs of more general interest out from the vendor specific blogs.
• Cloud Application Vendors: Applications Based on Cloud Computing
• Cloud Computing Vendors: Supply cloud computing resources
• Open Source Projects: Self explanatory

If you see something missing, please drop me a line, and I’ll include your links.

http://www.maidsafe.net/diary

See also Cloud Blogs.

Cloud Blogs

Cloud Vendor Blogs

Cloud Computing Vendors

User Groups (Coming Soon)

Open Source Projects (Coming Soon)