Amazon EC2 I/O Performance: Local Ephemeral Disks vs. RAID 0 Striped EBS Volumes
I recently ran into an issue with I/O bandwidth in EC2 that produced some unexpected results. As part of my day job, I built a system to run clustered deployments of enterprise software within AWS....
View Article“Android will run majority of smartphones by Spring”
This latest quote comes from Adobe Systems’ CTO Kevin Lynch during an interview with Fortune. It’s actually an approximation of what he said, but I think it captures his intent, which is to suggest...
View Article“How Big is Amazon’s Cloud Computing Business?”
Everyone seems to think that Amazon’s web services business (a.k.a. EC2, S3, and the rest of AWS) is very big and getting bigger, but Amazon stubbornly refuses to break out the AWS contribution to...
View Article“Is colocation cheaper than using a cloud computing service to run the same...
This quote comes from an analysis of the costs of cloud-based computing vs. traditional colocation as a function of the work load and duty cycle. This type of analysis is increasingly germane for...
View ArticleSiri – a Shot Across Google’s Bow
I had a chance to play with Siri on my wife’s iPhone 4S and after the novelty wore off I was left with a very strong feeling that Siri will usher in a paradigm shift in how we search the internet —...
View Articlelibkafka – a C++ client library for Apache Kafka v0.8+
I had a need for a C++ client API for Apache Kafka with support for the new v0.8 wire protocol, and I didn’t see one out in the wild yet. So I found some time and wrote one. You can find it here on...
View ArticleThe Myth of Internet Privacy and Security
I have been following the massive coverage of the Snowden affair with detached professional interest as someone with some Internet security experience. I recently read Bruce Schneier’s call to arms to...
View ArticleNginx Reverse Proxy Config for Rails 4 ActionController::Live Streaming
I have been working with streaming data sources on my current project and I needed to implement a way to stream the contents of Apache Kafka topics over HTTP with 1:N connection fanout. As a quick...
View ArticleRunning Sunspot and Solr with Rails 4 in Production
I recently added full text search capabilities to one of my projects and I decided to use Apache Solr and the Sunspot gem for Rails. Sunspot is awesome and ridiculously easy to integrate with Rails in...
View ArticleNotes on the Keynote from Black Hat 2014
A few quick notes to share on the keynote yesterday at Black Hat 2014 in Las Vegas: The keynote speaker was Dan Geer. Dan Geer is currently Chief Information Security Officer for In-Q-Tel. In-Q-Tel is...
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