Erik Howard

I’ve been teaching myself Erlang.  It’s a great Functional Programming language. I’ve also dabbled a little with Scala.Besides wanting to learn a new computer language, I’ve also wanted to port some of my high-traffic Ruby On Rails sites into Erlang. Erlang will be able to handle 3x-4x the traffic using less resources. Less EC2 instances up and running means more money in my pocket.

Lets rewind to about a month ago. As I usually do, I skipped past the README files and installed Erlang with apt-get. Ten seconds later, I had Erlang up and running on my Ubuntu development VM. Like a bad teenage horror movie, I’m sure you can see where this is going.Fast forward to present day. I was running into another serious compiler error with Erlang.

More rumors today from TechCrunch about Google and Twitter.  Michael Arrington from TechCrunch goes on to say that Google and Twitter are in early talks of some type of partnership or an outright acquisition.Last year Facebook was in talks to buy Twitter for over a half billion dollars. Twitters current valuation is around $250 million dollars. If such a deal would go through this would be the second time that Evan Williams has sold a company he co-founded to Google.

[/caption]Today, Amazon annouced the availability of it’s newest web servrice – Elastic MapReduce.Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. It utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

The Motley Fool has a new article on why Google should buy Twitter.They assert that Google would be the most suitable match for Twitter. They could afford to buy the non-revenue generating Twitter in this bad economic environment.They would have no problems hosting Twitter. Google has the horsepower and bandwidth to prevent Tweet Overload. The culture and vision of both companies would not clash as much as a Microsoft Twitter tie-up.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a commercial web service offering that allows you to rent your own server in which to deploy your applications. The infrastructure is highly scalable and allows you to increase or decrease your computing horsepower based on demand. Think of it as your own elastic data center where you only pay for the resources that you use.

While startups, consultants and individuals are rushing to put their applications in the cloud large enterprises are, for the most part, are still sitting on the fence.What is preventing adoption of cloud computing for enterprises. It basically comes down to a few issues – security, accountability and standards.Most cloud vendors, but not all, are mum (publicly at least) on the exact details of their cloud infrastructure.