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May 20, 2009

Ray Ozzie – Comments on Cloud Computing

An interesting quote from Ray Ozzie at the J.P. Morgan Tech conference today

“… at some point in time every major enterprise, every company, every ISV is going to have some blend of software that runs on-premises and some that runs in the cloud, and everyone wants tools that they can use to in essence deploy some apps to part of their organization that might be in the cloud …”

(h/t TechCrunchIT)

Nothing revolutionary is his quote, but it does re-emphasize my thoughts about Amazon/EC2 – when are they valued for their cloud computing technology? When are they acquired for their cloud computing technology?

Posted by davehod at 03:39 PM | Comments (0)

May 18, 2009

Amazon Rocks The House with New EC2 Features

Amazon announced three new features for EC2 today:

EC2 Services

There are a lot of conversations going on about the new features. Looks like Amazon has significantly extended their lead in cloud computing. Who'd a thunk it?

Several things jump to mind for me:

* BaconMarathon – we've been running our top3Clicks Facebook app in the EC2 cloud for more than a year now. Overall, the experience has been quite good, but there were a few things missing, most notably a scaling technology solution. I looked at RightScale, but their price point was not for us. Additionally, basic monitoring (disk space, CPU, RAM, app-level like HTTP GET) would have saved us from a few outages and the heartburn that comes with it.

* AMZN p/e - when does Amazon's p/e ratio begin to reflect the technical leadership/lead that they have established in cloud computing? Or has this already occurred since $AMZN is trading at a current p/e of 48.64 while GOOG is 29.02? I saw just today that AT&T was launching a cloud initiative with EMC; great that they are coming to the party, but they are pretty late. Amazon is grouped in Retail - when does this change/does Amazon need to spin this out into a separate company to realize the true forward looking value of the technology? Or, when does an IBM acquire Amazon for the technology and sell-off the retail business? Even more far-fetched, when does Amazon start acquiring technology companies in an Oracle-type rollup strategy?

Great comment from Matthew Snape on my Friendfeed post:

Dave AWS is so brilliant because it is a retail operation. They sell CPU time in exactly the same way they sell books or dvd's, all you need is a credit card. Compare that with the way IBM or Oracle operate. Perhaps it will be Amazon buying Oracle?

* Startups - We've all seen this movie before, but when startups build functionality on top of another company's APIs, things usually go something like this:

Perhaps folks like RightScale will figure out how to add more value/build out their cloud support to other offerings like IBM, Google, Microsoft, etc.

Posted by davehod at 04:24 PM | Comments (0)

USATF Amends Rule 144.3/Headphones Now Allowed

Huzzah!

I’m a little behind, but apparently the USATF has decided to give marathon race directors the leeway to allow headphones during races. No more sneaking in your iPods, risking a DNF after all your hard training. Or only running marathons that choose to go against the USATF.

Excellent news, as I’m definitely bringing my iPod Shuffle when we run the Newport Oregon marathon in 12 days (<gulp>). Gotta load it up with the new Green Day…

Posted by davehod at 10:42 AM | Comments (0)

May 12, 2009

Software Agility or Facebook, Did You Break My App Again?

Last Thursday night, Bacon heard from a top3Clicks user that our app was broken and provided some specifics repro cases. We checked them out, and sure enough the user was correct. Our app on Facebook was actually unusable, a true high priority situation.

Thanks to our easy roll-forward/roll-back deployment mechanisms, I was able to quickly run through the last 4 builds, diff all the JS (in the actual cloud and in SVN) and determine that *we* didn’t break anything.

So I started searching the FB dev forums.

A few minutes later, I found it: an FB deployment on Thursday contained a critical bug. The particular bug was disastrous for our app and many others as it broke any use of Javascript EventListeners. Other developers posted repro cases, eventually getting down to this simple case:

Just wanted to add that simply calling purgeEventListeners on an element is enough to notice that it doesn't work

A case this simple provides ample evidence that Facebook is doing a poor job of unit testing their changes. There are a number of ways to unit test Javascript in general, including JsUnit.

In this day and age, there is no excuse for not requiring developers to create/maintain an adequate level of unit tests. In fact, the absence of unit tests is a reason *to not ship*. The challenge of quick iterative cycles should not include a culture where having your end-users function as your QA is standard operating procedure. There is a wealth of information available on how to be nimble while producing high-quality output.

If anyone has links to FB presentations about Developer quality processes/metrics, please send them my way.

Update:
The fix is now broken again. Guess they rolled back the change. Sheesh

Posted by davehod at 01:16 PM | Comments (0)

May 06, 2009

And You Thought Twitter Jumped the Shark When Oprah Signed Up

So many of us thought Twitter had truly jumped the shark a few weeks ago.

Was it the Ashton Kutcher race with CNN to get to a million followers? Or the very high profile Oprah sign-up/usage on national TV. Maybe it was all the follow-up stories about how 60% of new Twitter users quit after a month.

Perhaps.

Yesterday though, it became official. The other shark-jumping signs were just head fakes compared to this one: Steve Gillmor (of Attention Xml fame – yeah, remember that one?) posted on TechCrunch that RSS is dead (“Rest in Peace, RSS”). Who exactly killed RSS? Why Twitter of course.

Yes, those 140 characters of wonder have replaced any and all value that RSS brings. Steve argues that the real-time nature of Twitter is so superior that Fred Wilson’s latest Boxee post just smokes in Twitter but sucks in RSS.

Steve, get real.

Twitter is great. RSS ain’t dead. Long live RSS (and Atom :-))

Posted by davehod at 12:18 PM | Comments (0)