How to Synch S3 Buckets in AWS and design for failover
News of Friday’s problems with the Virginia Data Centers power system taking down sites like Netflix and Pinterestshows that sometimes not programming for fail over or data center failure is a pretty foolish thing to do. Especially with costs somewhat reasonable per gigabyte in Amazon’s S3 system. Anyone who does not program for fail over [...]
The Right Storage, the Right Cloud
We spend a lot of time in this blog talking about the architecture of elastic infrastructure clouds (EIC) like AWS and our own Open Cloud System. We contrast this against the architecture of enterprise virtualization clouds (EVC) like VCE’s Vblock. Nowhere are these differences more obvious than when you look at how storage systems are [...]
Proxies Are As Useful As Real Data
Last year I ran a highly unscientific experiment. I would regularly put a DVD in an open mail bin in my office to mail it back to Netflix, every late Monday afternoon. I would also count the total number of Netflix DVDs put inside that bin by other people. Over a period of time I [...]
Box Solves the Enterprise Adoption Roadblock
I’ve spent the last few years watching the meteoric rise of cloud content management vendor Box. Their approach has been to empower individual groups or business units within an organization to collaborate more effectively around their content and then to expand their presence within the organization. The “land and expand” strategy is a valid one, [...]
Data Is More Important Than Algorithms
Netflix Similarity Map In 2006 Netflix offered to pay a million dollar, popularly known as the Netflix Prize, to whoever could help Netflix improve their recommendation system by at least 10%. A year later Korbel team won the Progress Prize by improving Netflix’s recommendation system by 8.43%. They also gave the source code to Netflix [...]
On Public, Private and Horses for Courses…
I recently wrote a post critiquing some shortsighted thinking around Cloud Computing and in particular the relative cost implications of a Cloud versus Self-Hosted approach. A recent series of events has reminded me of this issue and bought me back to the topic. Recently Zynga, during a regular earnings call, released the somewhat startling fact [...]
Zynga and Z-Cloud–A Corollary to the Public Cloud
At the Cloud Connect event in Santa Clara recently, Allan Leinwand, CTO from Zynga presented a keynote the day after a fairly emphatic statement contained in their earnings call that speaks to their marked retreat from the public cloud. In the space of 12 months Zynga has gone from 80% of workloads being in the [...]
Why SOPA is going to be unenforceable
I would lay odds that SOPA is going to pass, and pass by a majority in the house and senate; it is debatable if the president will sign it. If you have been involved in Bittorrent or P2P systems for a long time, you know that the minute something passes like a law against something, [...]
Disrupt Yourself Before Others Disrupt You: DVD To Streaming Transition Is Same As On-Premise To Cloud
Recently, Netflix separated their streaming and DVD subscription plans. As per Netflix’s forecast, they will lose about 1 million subscribers by the end of this quarter. The customers did not like what Netflix did. A few days back, Netflix’s CEO, Reed Hastings, wrote a blog post explaining why Netflix separated their plans. He also announced [...]
Beating Apples system Amazon introduces Cloud Reader
Is this one of the first chinks in Apples armor for eBooks? I have tried repeatedly to use the eBook development kit for Apple, and honestly from a user friendly and programmatic viewpoint it is probably the worst chunk of software pushed by Apple. If the eBook fits all specifications and everyone from Amazon to [...]
Plane Simple
It’s amazing, though not in the least bit surprising, that the recent AWS outage has generated such widespread attention, with a plethora of blog posts from customers to industry experts taking up pixel space across all corners of the globe. I think it’s fairly obvious to all that since the event, everything that needs to [...]
The Hollywood Culture
Debates are fun, especially when you are jousting with such fantastic and respected cloud dignitaries as Chris Hoff, Adrian Cockcroft and Simon Wardley. Come on, I mean who wouldn’t enjoy a good natured, well intended, yet fierce back and forth about the various clouds and their various philosophies ? Well, March 12 was a day [...]
Will Amazon’s Video Streaming Service Hurt Netflix?
Amazon recently announced a video streaming service available for free to their Amazon Prime subscribers. From what we have heard in the media, Amazon will end up offering a competitive service to Netflix. We all know that Netflix has recently moved most of their infrastructure to Amazon Web Services. In this post, I will briefly [...]
Looking Back 2010: Netflix’s NY Times Moment
This is my third post in the Looking Back 2010 series where I highlight important cloud related events in this year. After OpenStack and Salesforce.com’s Heroku acquisition news, the third important news from my point of view is Netflix’s embrace of AWS for all their IT needs. This is very important for the validation of [...]
Why Public Clouds Will Eventually Win The Game
Long term readers of this blog know my views on public vs private cloud debate. I believe that private clouds may dominate over public clouds among the enterprises in the short run but, in the long run, most of the workloads will move to the public clouds. The cloud economics will be a major driving [...]
