
Interview With an AWS Cloud Champion
Allow me to introduce a good friend, Peter Sankauskas, who I met through the AWS cloud community. Our level of cloud experience evolved with the expansion of the cloud, Amazon in particular, and we have both become prominent members of the AWS community. Having learned more about open source and development, I’d like to focus on the […]

The Roadmap to ‘Hadoop in the Cloud’
The Twitter ball started rolling again just now. Matt Asay posed an interesting question about Forrester suggesting Hadoop isn’t a great fit for the cloud. (Even) without context Vijay Vijayasankar and I started firing off questions and answers which inevitable led to my promise of writing down the transition plan for it Here it is I’ll start bottom-up, from […]

Wintersmith Documentation
I set out a few days ago to put together a documentation site. I had a few criteria for this site: A static site that I could push to Github to use with their github pages feature. The static site is generated from markdown. It just works. It’s easy to get it into a workflow […]

Learning About Docker
Over the next dozen or so few days I’ll be ramping up on Docker, where my gaps are and where the project itself is going. I’ve been using it on and off and will have more technical content, but today I wanted to write a short piece about what, where, who and how Docker came […]

Riak Development Guidance: The “Client Round Robin Anti-Pattern”
One of the features that is often available in Riak Client software (including the CorrguatedIron .NET Client, the riak-js client and others) is the ability to send requests to the Riak Cluster through a round robin style approach. What this means is each IP, of each node within the Riak Cluster is entered into a […]

OSCON : Conversations, Deployments, Architecture, Docker and the Future?
I wrote about my first day of OSCON “OSCON : Day 1, Windows Just Doesn’t Do Cloud Foundry… but, there’s a fix for that…“. The rest of the week was most excellent. I caught up with friends and past coworkers. I heard about people working on some amazing new projects. Some things I will try […]
Back in the Bosh Bunker
In the last post on the topic of Bosh I put together a simple Cloud Foundry environment using the tools & repos of Stark & Wayne. Even though the bootstrap is a great way to get an environment up and started, it doesn’t explain a lot of things about Bosh. So let’s take a look […]

You Can’t Automate Your Way to the Cloud
When racing to execute a ‘cloud’ strategy, it can be very tempting for IT organizations to try and automate their way to the cloud. A key benefit of the cloud is operational efficiency. We know that humans are error prone and costly, which makes automation such an enticing solution. Add to this the fact that […]

Deploycon, PaaS & the pending data tier gravity fallout…
For a quick recap of last years Deploycon & related talks, check out my “Day #3 => DeployCon && Enterprise && Data Gravity” entry from last year. PaaS Systems aren’t always effectively distributed. Heroku has fallen over every time east-1 has gone down at AWS. Not that I’m saying they’ve done bad, just pointing that […]

ORMs Suck, I’m Asking & I’m Telling
Here’s a thing that’s come up already. ORMs, or Object Relational Mapper, are a RDBMS based thing for devs that want, in essence a statically typed object to deal with when writing code (yes, I know there’s a ton of other things an ORM can do or be used for, but I’m going with a […]

Cloud Computing and Distributed Computing, Something is Broken
First off, I’m going to start off with some definitions to clarify things for this conversation. Cloud Computing, in general, has been perverted to mean almost anything available for sale today in technology. It’s rhetorically stupid. But we all still use the term to some degree. Going back to cloud computing at the core, we’re […]

Android? Car mode? Speakerphone auto-on? Bluetooth volume fail? Micro-USB design-flaw!
Are you -that is, your phone- suffering from the following symptoms? weeks or even months ago, “car mode” started to seemingly randomly get enabled ever since, that seemed to happen more often at some point, when you made or received a call, the speakerphone would sometimes be automatically turned on since a while, when you […]

TIBCO’s Silver Fabric – a golden lining
I attended TIBCO’s PaaS workshop, where they showed and demoed Silver Fabric – the product that has come forth from the DataSynapse acquisition in September 2009. Erik Hageman, Mario Invernizzi and Steven van der Kroftlead the session. The location was the Radisson Blu near Schiphol, a fine location with excellent service and food & drinks. After we had […]

What drives IT failure? Ignorance and Greed
It was an interesting question Charles Storm posed the other day: was I saying that solutions are primarily driven by ignorance and greed? I wasn’t, but he made me think: Every solution is driven by need, or want, and some lack of knowledge. Every failure is caused by ignorance and greed Let’s see whether I […]

How and why common sense will beat REST
In my previous post I described how REST would replace SOAP. If you paid close attention you will have noticed that I actually didn’t say anything in favour of REST, but everything at the expense of SOAP. Because it indeed seems like REST will be the new SOAP – which is in contradiction with the […]