You start with some philosophical rules, and you try to make them stick. Providing guidelines is the only way to start.

References

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• Scott Berkun’s Blog Post on User Reviews

Datacenter Knowledge mentions Flexiscale having issues

The problems for FlexiScale began when one of the main storage volumes was accidentally deleted by an employee during a system upgrade earlier this week.

as well as another company called LinkUp (although I guess it’s down now) having issues too:

a cloud storage previously known as Media Max, which shut down Aug. 8 after losing “an unspecified amount of customer data

Ouch. As the industry fashionistas and the hordes of zombies (and I guess everyone else pulled in from the vortex created) moves towards trying to fulfill what Nicholas Carr dubs the Big Switch I can only surmise that more cases of cloud computing companies will continue to go belly up due to dumb mistakes, poor execution, etc, name your classic dumb mistake here. This will leave behind the vendors who have spent time at multiple levels (besides just technology) to ensure that many of the typical mistakes that will hit any IT business can be recovered from instead of being the critical wound that kils.

Read more!

• Datacenter Knowledge on LinkUp going Belly Up
• Datacenter Knowledge on issues at Flexiscale
• A little bit on Nicholas Carr’s big vision

Here’s a juicy quote from their blog post on Jeff Bozos talking about them:

This is about 50 EC2 instances down here. Their Facebook app kind of broke through. And so this is their Facebook app taking off. This is just three days ago, April 16th.

You can see they’ve gone from 50 instances of EC2 usage up to 3,500 instances of EC2 usage. It’s completely impractical in your own data center over the course of three days to scale from 50 servers to 3,500 servers. Don’t try this at home.

Great showcase for Cloud Computing. Too bad not ALL applications can take advantage of Cloud Computing. But glad to see ideas that can.

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And oh yes… since their frontend is a Rails app of course it can’t scale

We also had an occasion to have 2,000 simultaneous (as in at the same time, pounding on their keyboards) connections … thanks to Jetty Continuations … and an average of 700 requests per second on a dual core opteron with a load average of around 0.24… try that with your Rails app.

So, to this customer’s JVM, the Scala and lift code looks, smells and tastes just like Java code. If I renamed the scala-library.jar file to apache-closures.jar, nobody would know the difference… at all.

For a Java shop deploying a Scala app might not be AS big a deal. However, when you have a clean slate and don’t even need to sell Java just a solution selling Scala becomes a little bit more blurred.

Read it yourself

Scale your application, while leaving your existing database untouched by front-ending the database with In-Memory-Data-Grid (IMDG) or caching technologies. The database acts as a persistence store in the background. I refer to this approach as Persistence as a Service (PaaS).

Although I do question how reliable the background persistence to a database is. Seems another layer of complexity that requires understanding in case it has issues of its own. After lookign at the Gigaspaces website, it looks like a typical Java-powered auto-generated website with tons of information all over the place but hard to find a good starting point (Yes I found the tutorials thank you) or any great documentation for a newbie.

• Read more on scaling out mysql
• Read more on Gigaspaces

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