Cloud Computing

There is an evolution happening in how organizations of all shapes and sizes consume business services.  More and more, business services are being consumed from either public or private “clouds”.  But as Kirill Sheynkman points out in “21 Experts Define Cloud Computing”:

“The ‘cloud’ model initially has focused on making the hardware layer consumable as on-demand compute and storage capacity. This is an important first step, but for companies to harness the power of the cloud, complete application infrastructure needs to be easily configured, deployed, dynamically-scaled and managed in these virtualized hardware environments.”   Read more…

It is always surprising to me the lack of attention that is paid to monitoring when customers purchase cloud hosting services.   Mostly, I think it is because the business owners and many system administrators don’t really understand the complexities of  properly “instrumenting” even a moderately complex application (web or otherwise) and take it for granted.   Read more…

In the cloud … faster is better.  But how much faster equals how much better?  If your site loads even one second faster, will your audience grow?  Will you have more sales?  If so, by how much?  Would you believe it takes only half a second to lose 1/5th of your visitors?   Read more…

Caching is a key concept in computing.  Caching algorithms and hardware are used in virtually every aspect of computing to increase efficiency and performance.   When it comes to web sites and applications there are numerous caching mechanisms potentially in play that can have a dramatic impact on the end users experience. Read more…

I am frequently asked by techies why Carbon60 uses InfiniBand technology to power its cloud computing fabric. For many, this is an unusual choice. Despite the fact that half of the world’s most powerful super-computers use InfiniBand, the technology has not made its way into the typical datacenter. Read more…