infrastructure

Is Google's BigTable too private?

SAN FRANCISCO--During a panel discussion at the Structure conference here Wednesday, various representatives from the cloud-computing world offered their views. Panelists included:

Christophe Bisciglia, senior software engineer, Google Jason Hoffman, founder and chief technology officer, Joyent Tony Lucas, CEO, XCalibre Communications Lew Moorman, senior vice president of strategy and corporate development, Rackspace Geva Perry, chief marketing officer, GigaSpaces Joe Weinman, VP of Strategic Solutions at AT&T

The panelists agreed that there will be open and proprietary, as well as specialized, cloud platforms. The discussion got a little heated between Google's Bisciglia and Joyent's Hoffman on the … Read more

Amazon's blueprint for cloud computing

In the early morning at Structure 08, AMR Research's Jonathan Yarmis described various tech trends around cloud computing. Mendel Rosenblum, a founder and technical lead behind VMware, outlined the role of virtualization in data centers.

Now Werner Vogels, vice president and CTO at Amazon.com, is talking about why Amazon is in the cloud computing business, how it got there, and why customers should want it. Instead of every company or developer doing the heavy lifting, dealing with the "muck" as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos likes to say, Amazon opened up its software-as-a-service stack (Amazon Web Services) … Read more

The new geek chic: Data centers

Forget about flashy Web 2.0 applications. The real, geeky coolness of the Web is the growing acreage of data centers that deliver bits to billions of devices. At GigaOM's Structure 08 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, infrastructure--"clouds" of servers, storage and networks--was the headliner.

Jonathan Yarmis, vice president of advanced, emerging and disruptive technologies at AMR Research, said changes in the next five years will make the past Internet revolution feel like child's play. He didn't explain exactly how the next five years will be more revolutionary than evolutionary, but outlined the … Read more

Scaling fast-growing Facebook

In this video interview, Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations at Facebook, talks with about managing Facebook's hypergrowth. Heiliger is a rock star infrastructure geek. He was the CTO of Global Crossing at age 23, worked at Marc Andreessen's Loudcloud and spent time as the head of Web engineering at Walmart.com.

During the interview, Heiliger said that Facebook has more than 10,000 servers and leverages mostly open-source software across a distributed architecture, with thousands of MySQL instances. "It's almost a new challenge every day," Heiliger said regarding the challenges of keeping up … Read more

The most important open-source projects...to Google

Chris Dibona, head of Google's open source program office, sat down to talk with CNET's Stephen Shankland. In the course of that interview, Chris provided great insight into how Google views open source and contributes back to the various communities from which it derives benefit.

However, it was this response to Stephen's question - "What are the most important open-source projects you ingest?" - that I found fascinating:

The kernel, compilers--GCC, the Python interpreter. Python is very important to us....Java is very important to us, and that's become open-source now. We have some … Read more

News flash: Web 2.0 is unreliable

In the blogosphere of early and ardent technology adopters, sites like Twitter and Seesmic have justifiably gained the attention and buzz. Twitter has had a series of well documented outages, and this weekend Seesmic seized up when videos of movie celebrities, such Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford, were posted to the video sharing site.

It also caused problems at partner sites, like TechCrunch, that embed Seesmic video comments (vomments) on their pages.

These recurring problems once again demonstrate that the much loved Web 2.0, consisting of many start-ups lacking adequate infrastructure and stable code, is unreliable. The larger start-ups … Read more

The future of open-source infrastructure is...applications?

It occurred to me today that open-source infrastructure providers (e.g., commercial providers of open-source operating systems, databases, application servers, etc.) may have much in common with telecommunications infrastructure providers (like cable, wireless, etc. providers).

Everyone uses their stuff, and generally at a rate that doesn't quite match the value of the benefits derived from it.

Early on we pay a premium for broadband Internet or support for still-buggy but cheaper open-source software. Over time it becomes commodified and our willingness to pay decreases.

What's a company to do?… Read more

Expect more PKI in 2008

Wasn't 1999 supposed to be "the year of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)?" Yes, I know, another analyst prediction that didn't come to fruition. It's fair to chastise the analysts for another missed call, but PKI certainly shares some of the blame.

It really is difficult to imagine a "year of PKI" because PKI isn't your typical technology trend. PKI isn't a standalone security widget, it is a complex infrastructure that must be integrated into existing applications and business processes. Once implemented however, PKI can really improve security, protect data integrity, and … Read more

DemoFall '07: Useful infrastructure stuff

The afternoon session at DemoFall (more) features "enablers and sea changers." Looks like a group of highly useful technologies, if not exactly sexy. Here are my quick takes on the presentations:

Jasper Wireless is a single cellular network that devices can connect to inexpensively from several different countries. There's a Web dashboard so the machines' human masters can get visibility into what they're doing and where they are. The platform can also "provision" (turn on) consumer wireless devices easily and cost-effectively.

Talari Networks speeds up enterprise wide-area networking for cheap. "Demo" is … Read more