Tag: Thought Pieces

For a while I have been using the term “success disaster” to characterize what can happen on the web all too easily. What’s a success disaster? You put up a piece of content somewhere and you get ready to handle a reasonable number of downloads. Being the creative person that you are, however, links to […]

Jon Boutelle, CTO of Slideshare.net (previously featured here) sent me some cool comments that just happen to reinforce the Web-Scale message I’ve been talking about recently. Here’s what he had to say (links are mine): The dedicated hardware we were initially considering would have cost $1000 to startup, and $800/month in ongoing costs. Most importantly, […]

There’s a really interesting post over on the Texas Startup Blog. Here are some tidbits: “The Amazon web services products (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud – EC2 and Amazon S3) are built for the little guy AND the big guy.” Yes, absolutely. And let’s not forget the little guys who want to become big guys — […]

I was on a conference call yesterday and the topic of ways to store persistent data when using Amazon EC2 came up a couple of times. It would be really cool to have a persistent instance of a relational database like MySQL but there’s nothing like that around at the moment. An instance can have […]

Earlier this week I was trying (and failing miserably) to explain an idea to a co-worker. I promised to clear up my thoughts and to encapsulate them in a blog post, so here goes. In a nutshell, if you take a peek behind the scenes at a web site, you will find a highly configurable […]

Fixed costs are the enemy of any business. Money that must be invested up front to pay for land, buildings, furniture, machine tools, and computers all constitute fixed costs. Regardless of the amount of income that’s coming in, interest must be paid on the capital expended on fixed costs. In a post titled “Amazon S3… […]

I simply couldn’t wait until next week to post a couple of new items! In S3 Meets R3 (Reliability, Robustness, and Resilience), the authors benchmark Amazon S3 against the venerable SCP (Secure Copy) protocol. You can read the entire article to see the details, but the conclusion pretty much sums it up: Amazon’s S3 Services […]

I met Martin Kochanski, developer of Cardbox, in London last month. We met at the Athenaeum Club and had a very pleasant working lunch. As we talked, it was really clear to me that Martin held a number of interesting opinions about all sorts of subjects and we talked about blogging as an information sharing […]