Enterprise level mashups
We are seriously considering offloading some of our data storage and hosting needs to Amazon Web Services, and if that works out - it most certainly will - we 'll offload some more and take it from there.
Amazon has quietly been building a google-grade, highly scalable, reliable and distributed in nature infrastructure, while most folks would disregarding it as an e-tailer. The largest e-tailer, but 'just' an e-tailer nevertheless. They were wrong. Bezos is not to be taken lightly.
Secure Storage Service(S3) is the AWS's flagship service. In short, it allows for 'unlimited' data storage and access of arbitrary data objects ( AKA files ) consolidated into buckets ( psudo-directories ). Its trivial to access the service via its XML (REST and SOAP ) based API. Its super-cheap ( especially if you happen to be dealing with the kind of price tags ISPs in Greece attach to their related offerings ) and, how about that, it works.
It's been suggested before and it gets more obvious by the day. With a very little sum of money, lots of will and dedication and, preferably, with a good idea to ago along, a bunch of guys can build the next Youtube. Delegate the storage and hosting to AWS, setup a few servers ( you can 'hire' virtual servers on AWS's Elastic Compute Cloud for 10 cents / hour ) to do your bidding, use blogs for free ( and highly effective ) PR, and hey-presto, money and fame are pouring in.
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and an ever increasing companies are offering similar services ( software as a service, where did I here that before ) which you can bring in together, mash-them-up and you are set. Scalability, distribution and reliability is implicitly guaranteed by the service providers. We are entering this business sooner or later. All our services ( we love modules and components here ) have been designed to be accessible via XML (XML-RPC, REST, SOAP, JSON etc) . Also, we are big on clusters and fault tolerant systems so just about everything is already in place. In fact, everything has been in place for over 5 or so years, since we switched to the new architecture model.
We live in interesting times. Interesting things happen all the time. Go ahead, build the next big thing and contribute to that interest factor. Trust me, you are going to have a whole lot of fun doing it.
Saturday, 16 June 2007 6:52 pm
Summer in the city
Traditionally, summer is a chance for most of us to de-accelerate and de-compress, given that most of our web properties users and most of our business partners and customers are too, doing the same thing. Summer provides the chance to toy around with some ideas ( R&D playground galore ), revisit some issues that were not really that important to begin with just because the spirits are high. All in all, deviate from the norm and sometimes even go wild.
Alas, this is not true for this summer. Too much work piled up during winter+spring, more keeps on piling ( clearly, contradicting the de-acceleration metaphor I used earlier ) and, as if that wasn't enough, summer time is severely affecting the collective productivity and thinking capacity of the team. After all, it is summer - the beach, parties, nights out, you get the picture.
For the past few days I have been working on a updated new component for our Switch framework. It is bound to take a few more days until it gets to the point where I will even know if its going to work. In the mean time, our bugs/features tracking system's list is growing by leaps and bounds, our individual TODO lists ( everyone has his own preferred way to keep track of things ; many of them are aggregated back to that system ) are over populated, demand from every front is rising ( which of course is great, from a business perspective ) and, sometimes, all that you can do is stare at the ceiling as if it ( the ceiling ) will somehow help you deal with those issues. It never does, at least not directly.
We need to get more people (job openings) and find a way to deal with the summer. Preferably, get some more smart folks aboard so that even summer won't be able to affect our karma.
Wednesday, 13 June 2007 11:28 pm
Problems, gaming, and the mystery of the lost packets
Its been a whole long while since I last had the {time, will, chance} to blog, for various reasons - mostly because time didn't permit so neither the mood was aligned properly for scribing words here. The past two weeks ( I keep using this 'the past two weeks' sentence, its a recurring theme.. ) were - still are - crazy. We are suffering from multiple networking failures, whereas the actual source of the problem is still untraced for all three ISPs we utilize cannot get to the bottom of this. In addition to that, we are having some other problems ( of a similar nature ) of our own to battle with. All in all, its a binary chaos where the packets get routed to oblivion and bytes get morphed out of the blue. It can't get any worse than that ( actually, it can - but lets keep it sane ).
As if it wasn't enough to drive us crazy to the Nth degree, we are having various other issues related to software failures. However, software is usually something we can handle efficiently, and this is also the case. Those problems are almost gone.
Which brings us to the reason why I felt the need to blog in the first place. I HATE dealing with 3d party software or hardware. Be it routers, switches, web servers, database servers, you name it. Its about combinations of {lousy support, crappy implementation, bugs, lack of documentation, scalability limitations}. This is why I really dislike open source ( there are a few exceptions to the rule, Linux coming to mind ) and why I prefer building everything myself rather than relying on others. It may seem like a crazy idea, but doing everything in house has worked really well for us. Hopefully, someday soon I 'll be able to throw away Apache and sendmail, and even mySQL - dare I say - for our own solutions and be happy.
I picked up the Wii and my brother got my Zelda : the Twilight princess and the classic controller. The Wii is a bit of a unique system. Its really small, somewhat cool looking, can be used and set up in a snap, and feels very friendly, in a way. The new 'revolutionary' control scheme doesn't appeal to me that much - however my brother is crazy about it, given that he loves playing tennis and golf on Wii Sports, every chance he gets - however it seems at least interesting. The channels concept is pretty neat - I can't wait for the 'Internet channel' to become available so that I can browse the web on my TV with the Wiimote, and the shop has some lovely retro games to download/purchase.
Zelda is a magical, wonderful, beautiful, complete game. I 'd prefer using a classic controller for handling Link, but other than that this game is amazing. That game alone is worth buying the wii just to play it. EXTREMELY highly recommended.
Having said that, the 360 still seems like the ultimate game console to me. The future will tell how the PS3 and the Wii will fare against it.
On unrelated note, our team kicks ass. I am so proud to work with them. Go phaistonians!
Wednesday, 13 December 2006 0:57 am