EwanSilver.com

So you want to be enlightened?

Ewan — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 22:07:32 +0000

“And nobody expressed any concern that this might not be right?“
“Bill, you are building a system, not a collection of parts.“

London CloudCamp

Ewan — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 20:39:57 +0000

Alexis and the team at CohesiveFT are in the process of setting up a London Cloud Camp meeting. It is (tentatively) scheduled for July 16. It is still in the early day’s of preparation so we don’t have a page on Upcoming yet but you can see that the San Francisco camp is going great guns. Sign up on the registration page if you are interested.

Transylvania JUG

Ewan — Fri, 16 May 2008 12:03:56 +0000

Gabi and the Java developers at our development centre in Cluj Napoca have just set up the Transylvania Java User Group. The project site is here and a Google Group is available here.

They are holding their first meeting next Wednesday (21 May). The topic is : “Introduction to SpringSource Application Platform” and the event is registered here. We are hosting it at our offices:

Betfair
Str Somesului 2-12
Cluj Napoca.

Csaba has even created a logo.

How cool does Duke look there! I bet this has got to be one of the best JUG logos around!

Reliability

Ewan — Fri, 02 May 2008 10:05:03 +0000

Steve Vinoski talking about reliability (in particular my favourite: Erlang)

To achieve reliability, you have to accept the fact that failure will occur, Once you accept that, then other things fall into place: you need to be able to restart things quickly, and to do that, processes need to be cheap. If something fails, you don’t want it taking everything else with it, so you need to at least minimize, if not eliminate, sharing, which leads you to message passing. You also need monitoring capabilities that can detect failed processes and restart them

Amen to that!

Technorati Tags: reliability, Erlang

Yahoo! just cloning Google

Ewan — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 13:43:06 +0000

Interesting to see another Google-like piece of infrastructure cloning coming out of Yahoo!. Zookeeper appears to be almost identical to Chubby, Googles distributed lock service.

Technorati Tags: Google, Yahoo!, Hadoop, MapReduce, Zookeeper, Chubby

15 February 2008

Ewan — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 22:17:02 +0000

Large scale failure of Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services. Ouch.

Technorati Tags: Amazon, EC2, S3

31 January 2008

Ewan — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 15:18:46 +0000

MapReduce at Rackspace - OK it is not MapReduce (as beloved by Stonebraker et al) but its open source breathen Hadoop. Original link (and more info) at How Rackspace Now Uses MapReduce and Hadoop to Query Terabytes of Data.
MapReduce II - more installments.

Technorati Tags: MapReduce, Hadoop

23 January 2008

Ewan — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 07:55:33 +0000

Towards Robust Distributed Systems - Eric Brewer’s slidedeck that kicked off the whole CAP Theorem debate at PODC in 2000.

Technorati Tags: Towards Robust Distributed Systems, CAP Theorem, PODC

18 Jan 2008

Ewan — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 14:49:00 +0000

London Erlang Meeting - “How do you test large systems written in Erlang?” on Monday (I presume) Jan 21.
Map Reduce a major step back. Michael Stonebraker and David J. DeWitt let forth on why they dislike Google’s MapReduce infrastructure and how it is poor relation to standard relational database technology.
Relational Database Experts Jump The MapReduce Shark - a reply to Stonebraker and DeWitt that I pretty broadly agree with.
MapReducing 20 petabytes per day - Greg Linden commenting on the recent paper “MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters” by Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat.

Technorati Tags: Erlang, Stonebraker, DeWitt, MapReduce, relational, database, Relational Database, petabytes

Erlang design patterns/best practice?

Ewan — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 13:28:44 +0000

I am struggling to find any decent links to design patterns, best practice or good, basic architectural principles that you should use in building Erlang apps. Anyone know of any?

Technorati Tags: design pattern, best practice, architectural principles, Erlang