It’s coming up on 3 years now of writing, deploying and managing various types of applications in the cloud now. Here are a few things I’ve learned over the years. Cloud Vendor Selection Picking the best cloud vendor is like looking for unicorns. It’s not gonna happen. I have yet to find a vendor that has everything I need. That’s why I have...

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...

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...

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. EC2...