Archive For The “Services” Category

Microsoft Announces Open Source based Cloud Service

We see press releases go by all the time and most of them deserve the yawn they get. But, one caught my interest yesterday. At the PASS Summit conference Microsoft Vice President Ted Kummert announced that Microsoft will be offering a big data solution based upon Hadoop as part of SQL Azure. From the Microsoft…

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Changes in Networking Systems

I’ve been posting frequently on networking issues with the key point being the market is on the precipice of a massive change. There is a new model emerging. · Datacenter Networks are in my way · Networking: The Last Bastion of Mainframe Computing We now have merchant silicon providers for the core Application Specific Integrated…

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Spot Instances, Big Clusters, & the Cloud at Work

Spot Instances, Big Clusters, & the Cloud at Work

If you read this blog in the past, you’ll know I view cloud computing as a game changer (Private Clouds are not the Future) and spot instances as a particularly powerful innovation within cloud computing. Over the years, I’ve enumerated many of the advantages of cloud computing over private infrastructure deployments. A particularly powerful cloud…

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2011 European Data Center Summit

The European Data Center Summit 2011 was held yesterday at SihlCity CinCenter in Zurich. Google Senior VP Urs Hoelzle kicked off the event talking about why data center efficiency was important both economically and socially. He went on to point out that the oft quoted number that US data centers represent is 2% of total…

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Software Load Balancing using Software Defined Networking

Software Load Balancing using Software Defined Networking

I invited Nikhil Handigol to present at Amazon earlier this week. Nikhil is a Phd candidate at Stanford University working with networking legend Nick McKeown on the Software Defined Networking team. Software defined networking is an concept coined by Nick where the research team is separating the networking control plane from the data plane. The…

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Prioritizing Principlas in “On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services”

Brad Porter is Director and Senior Principal engineer at Amazon. We work in different parts of the company but I have known him for years and he’s actually one of the reasons I ended up joining Amazon Web Services. Last week Brad sent me the guest blog post that follows where, on the basis of…

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Yahoo! Compute Coop Design

Yahoo! Compute Coop Design

Chris Page, Director of Climate & Energy Strategy at Yahoo! spoke at the 2010 Data Center Efficiency Summit and presented Yahoo! Compute Coop Design. The primary attributes of the Yahoo! design are: 1) 100% free air cooling (no chillers), 2) slab concrete floor, 3) use of wind power to augment air handling units, and 4)…

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Dileep Bhandarkar on Datacenter Energy Efficiency

Dileep Bhandarkar presented the keynote at Server design Summit last December. I can never find the time to attend trade shows so I often end up reading slides instead. This one had lots of interesting tidbits so I’m posting a pointer to the talk and my rough notes here. Dileep’s talk: Watt Matters in Energy…

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Google Megastore: The Data Engine Behind GAE

Megastore is the data engine supporting the Google Application Engine. It’s a scalable structured data store providing full ACID semantics within partitions but lower consistency guarantees across partitions. I wrote up some notes on it back in 2008 Under the Covers of the App Engine Datastore and posted Phil Bernstein’s excellent notes from a 2008…

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Amazon Route 53 DNS Service

Amazon Route 53 DNS Service

Even working in Amazon Web Services, I’m finding the frequency of new product announcements and updates a bit dizzying. It’s amazing how fast the cloud is taking shape and the feature set is filling out. Utility computing has really been on fire over the last 9 months. I’ve never seen an entire new industry created…

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Availability in Globally Distributed Storage Systems

I love high-scale systems and, more than anything, I love data from real systems. I’ve learned over the years that no environment is crueler, less forgiving, or harder to satisfy than real production workloads. Synthetic tests at scale are instructive but nothing catches my attention like data from real, high-scale, production systems. Consequently, I really…

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GPU Clusters in 10 Minutes

Earlier this week Clay Magouyrk sent me a pointer to some very interesting work: A Couple More Nails in the Coffin of the Private Compute Cluster: Benchmarks for the Brand New Cluster GPU Instance on Amazon EC2. This detailed article has detailed benchmark results from runs on the new Cluster GPU Instance type and leads…

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HPC in the Cloud with GPGPUs

A year and half ago, I did a blog post titled heterogeneous computing using GPGPUs and FPGA. In that note I defined heterogeneous processing as the application of processors with different instruction set architectures (ISA) under direct application programmer control and pointed out that this really isn’t all that new a concept. We have had…

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AWS Compute Cluster #231 on Top 500

The Top 500 Super Computer Sites list was just updated and AWS Compute Cluster is now officially in the top half of the list. That means when you line up all the fastest, multi-million dollar, government lab sponsored super computers from #1 through to #500, the AWS Compute Cluster Instance is at #231:   Position…

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Datacenter Power Efficiency

Kushagra Vaid presented at Datacenter Power Efficiency at Hotpower ’10. The URL to the slides is below and my notes follow. Interesting across the board but most notable for all the detail on the four major Microsoft datacenters: · Services speeds and feeds: o Windows LiveID: More than 1B authentications/day o Exchange Hosted Services: 2…

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Datacenter Networks are in my Way

Datacenter Networks are in my Way

I did a talk earlier this week on the sea change currently taking place in datacenter networks. In Datacenter Networks are in my Way I start with an overview of where the costs are in a high scale datacenter. With that backdrop, we note that networks are fairly low power consumers relative to the total…

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