Archive For The “Services” Category
Yet another argument in favor of Degraded Operations Mode (http://mvdirona.com/jrh/perspectives/2008/01/22/DegradedOperationsMode.aspx) emerged last week. All of Amazon AWS (S3, SimpleDB, Simple Queuing Service, EC2, etc.) down for several hours last week: http://mvdirona.com/jrh/perspectives/2008/02/15/DowntimeAmazonS3SimpleDBSQS.aspx. The outage was reportedly due to a authentication storm: http://www.highscalability.com/s3-failed-because-authentication-overload (Mike Neil sent this my way). Remember, you’ll never have the capacity for the…
I recently was in a meeting with several physicians. One of them reported a result I have always suspected, but at a magnitude I never would have guessed. The core observation was that that 80% of medical diagnoses were incorrect. The other doctors in the room confirmed this number to be roughly consistent with their…
If you run a big service and claim to have never had down time you either 1) have close to zero customers or 2) are lying. It’s almost that simple. There is considerable concern that Amazons AWS service was down for several hours: · http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/02/amazons_s3_util.php · http://gigaom.com/2008/02/15/amazon-s3-service-goes-down/ · http://www.centernetworks.com/amazon-s3-down-error Thanks to Jeff Currier and Soumitra…
Google has published an interesting study of Mobile Search trends (sent my way by Tren Griffin). In this study the authors looked at over 1M queries submitted to Google Mobile web search over the course of a one month period. They found that the average search query was 2.56 words. (This is surprisingly similar to…
I was down at Amazon last week speaking at their Internal Developers conference. It was a fun trip in that I got to catch up with a bunch of old friends – a great many of which seemed to be working on S3 these days. I presented Designing and Deploying Internet Scale Services. Essentially best…
A couple of weeks back I attended the Berkeley RAD Lab Retreat. At this retreat, the RAD Lab grad students present their projects and, as is typical of Berkeley retreats, the talks we’re quite good. It was held up at Lake Tahoe which was great for the skiers but also made for an interesting drive…
The article below is a restricted version of what I view to be the next big thing. If I was doing a start-up today, it would be data analysis and optimization as a service. The ability to run real time optimization over an understandable programming platform for a multi-thousand node cluster is very valuable to…
Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly media spoke at Microsoft Research earlier today. It was a great, wide-ranging talk pounding through 103 slides roaming from social networking, through sensor and ambient computing, to Web2.0. Four themes for the talk: · Thoughts on social networking · Sensors and Ambient Computing · Web 2.0 and Wall Street · Open…
Many massively multi-player games have substantial parts of the game played and scored locally. The only way to get a sufficiently responsive gaming experience is to have the high speed game to player interactions local. Offloading some of the interactions from the server to the client is also an important way to reduce costs since…
I’m online over the holidays but everyone’s so busy there isn’t much point in blogging during this period. More important things dominate so I won’t be posting until early January. Have a great holiday. –jrh James Hamilton, Windows Live Platform Services Bldg RedW-D/2072, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington, 98052 W:+1(425)703-9972 | C:+1(206)910-4692 | H:+1(206)201
This note on the Google infrastructure was sent my way by Andrew Kadatch (Live Search) by way of Sam McKelvie (Cloud Infrastructure Services). It’s not precise in all dimensions, but it does a good job of bringing together the few facts that have been released by Google, and it points to its references if you…
The number 1 Amazon AWS requirement just got met: structured storage. Amazon announced SimpleDB yesterday although it’s not yet available for developers to play with. I’m looking forward to being able to write a simple application against it – I’ve had fun with S3. But, for now, the docs will have to do. In the…
I’ve long argued that the firm and clear division between development and operations common in many companies is a mistake. Development doesn’t feel the pain and understand what it takes to make their services more efficient to operate. Operations tends to hire more people to deal with the mess. It doesn’t work, it isn’t efficient,…
Amazon doesn’t release much about its inner workings which is unfortunate in that hey do some things notably well and often don’t get credit. My view is that making some of these techniques more public would be a great recruiting tool for Amazon but I understand the argument for secrecy as well. Ronny Kohavi recently…
Google has been hiring networking hardware folks so it’s been long speculated that they are building their own network switches. This remains speculation only but the evidence is mounting: From http://www.nyquistcapital.com/2007/11/16/googles-secret-10gbe-switch/ (Sent my way by James Depoy of the OEM team and Michael Nelson of SQL Server): Through conversations with multiple carrier, equipment, and component…
Last week I attended and presented at USENIX LISA (http://www.usenix.org/event/lisa07/) conference. I presented Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Applications and the slides are at: PowerPoint slides. I particularly enjoyed Andrew Hume’s (AT&T) talk where he talked about the storage sub-systems used at AT&T research and the data error rates he’s been seeing over the last several…