links for 2010-09-21: Amazon Hiding in Plain Sight; PostgreSQL 9.0 released; iPad good for two things; Oracle and HP make up; Unbreakable Enterprise Linux kernel performance doubts

• Hiding in Plain Sight: The Rise of Amazon Web Services - It really is surprising AWS doesn't get credit or press for much of what they are doing.  When they announce something they have it working and available, often with a free/beta tier.  When most other vendors announce something, it isn't available yet and when it is, you have to pay for it, get a machine, install it, etc.
  
• EnterpriseDB Announces Support for PostgreSQL 9.0 - 9.0 has some great new replication features that make it even more of a natural cheaper alternative to Oracle.
• The iPad is good for only two things - Admittedly, the first thing is pretty big and broad.
• Oracle and HP settle spat - Having the issue prolonged would not have been good for HP.
• Mirror, Mirror On The Wall, Which Is The Best Open Source DB Of Them All? - Will PostgreSQL fill the perceived void created by Oracle's ownership of MySQL?
  
• Oracle announces Unbreakable Enterprise Linux kernel - This story seems to doubt the performance claims.
  

Amazon further integrates Simple Notification Service with AWS

I've always been interested in messaging systems and had some fun learning about AWS's SNS and then building a simple Cloud Event Processor that utilized it earlier this year.  Amazon had already provided out of the box integration of SNS with the Simple Queue Service (SQS) but has now introduced integration with S3 so that you can get notifications for certain S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage events.

Asynchronous programming at work.  Good stuff!

links for 2010-04-29: AWS to be as big as Amazon retail?; Steve Jobs on Flash; Backlash against PowerPoint; Flash History

• Amazon Looks to Widen Lead in Cloud Computing - Opens a new data center in Singapore, but also says "Amazon Web Services can be as big as our retail business, in the fullness of time".
  
• Steve Jobs thoughts on Flash - He makes several good points, but calling Adobe closed and proprietary given Apple's tools target a single platform (vs many) and the closed nature of the App Store (vs anyone can create an app without approval) is a bit of the pot calling the kettle black.  And if third party software not taking advantage of new APIs and features is really so terrible, let the market determine that and decide.
• We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint - "Commanders say that the slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point. Imagine lawyers presenting arguments before the Supreme Court in slides instead of legal briefs."
• Flash History - A good reminder that Flash did fill a need, but he also had a zinger directly at Cupertino: "... a platform with a vendor who gets to decide what’s allowed to run is profoundly uninteresting to me anyhow."
• News Analysis: Salesforce.com and VMware Up The Ante In The Cloud Wars With VMforce - Good summary.  Pits the Java offerings vs Azure.
  

links for 2010-04-28: Android momentum; Microsoft and Open Source; VMforce; Web vs Enterprise; AWS Presentations

• Google: Numbers favor Android over iPhone - Some interesting stats and trends, and Apple and Microsoft certainly are validating that Android is a threat to them.
  
• Microsoft contributing to OSS - GPL even.
• The Java cloud? VMforce – Quick Analysis - Force.com gets real Java (well, Tomcat + Spring, no Java EE) and VMware gets a customer buying into their message/vision.
  
• Salesforce.com's partnership with VMware: Offense, defense or something in between? - Another view.
  
• Cassandra and The Enterprise Tension - MySQL responded to the tension one way, what will other tools built for the Web do when confronted by the "opportunity" to go after the enterprise too/instead?
  
• AWS Presentation Roundup - A good source for a variety of presentations on the Cloud and Amazon.

links for 2010-04-25: Is Apple or Adobe or Google open?; iPhone crimes; Amazon building out capacity

• Apple channels Google, Microsoft to attract developers - No one is fully open, but everyone tries to play the "open" card as they see fit.
  
• Tech cops are investigating possible crimes over lost iPhone prototype - Was Gizmodo committing a crime?
  
• Amazon to build out capacity for cloud, fulfillment and third party services - "... the need for more capacity means that fledgling businesses like Amazon Web Services ... are growing at a healthy clip."  Use of the Cloud is growing!

links for 2010-04-20: E-commerce witch hunt; ODF plugin no longer free; Oracle Java virtualization on JRockit, not Sun JVM; NoSQL and Cloud; iPhone leak loses customer

• Amazon's suit vs. North Carolina about preventing e-commerce witch hunt - Let's hope the witch hunt is prevented.
  
• $9,000 is the new 'free' for Oracle - This one doesn't make sense to me.  Why start charging, with a 100 user minimum, for something that isn't going to be adopted if it is charged for?  Especially since there is an open-source offering?  (I have not tried it)  How does this drive adoption?  And not only are they charging for it but are going to charge you maintenance too.  To top it off, the licensing information says there is a 90 day eval but you have to pay to download it.  Hmmm.
  
• Oracle Introduces Java Virtualization Solution for Oracle(R) WebLogic Suite - Sounds like a useful offering.  Perhaps it was in the works before the acquisition closed and is the reason, but what does it being based on JRockit say about the Sun JVM?
• NoSQL Needed For Cloud-Sized Data - Use the right tool for the right scenario.
  
• Peek at lost-and-found iPhone seals deal on Droid Incredible - The leak has affected at least one decision.

First impressions of Amazon Simple Notification Service

Amazon introduced their new Simple Notification Service (SNS) earlier this week and with a background and interest in integration and messaging I had to take a look.

The sign-up process is simple enough and I added access to it from my existing Amazon Web Services account and was pleased to see that current pricing includes a Free Tier that provides 100K requests and notifications (1K e-mail notifications) for free.  With that, I launched into the getting started guide.

I downloaded the CLI (minor nit, the guide gave the wrong pointer to where to download it, but was easily found), already had Java installed, so I set the required environment variables and was off an running.  There was a mention that the CLI was for Windows and Linux, but I forged ahead on my Mac figuring it would just work, and thankfully it did.

I followed the guide to create a topic, subscribe to it using e-mail, publish a message, and get the notification.  It all worked very nicely and as one would expect.  So, it works, but using a command line tool to send myself an e-mail isn't terribly useful or interesting and if that is all I did, this would be a pretty boring blog entry!  How about something more interesting then?

I have a weather station set up at home along with a web-site for viewing the current weather and uploading historical data to the Weather Underground.  I find myself checking the current conditions periodically, but polling for that kind of thing is a bit cumbersome.  It seems like having a notification pushed to me when certain conditions occur might be more useful and enter SNS to help solve that for me.

So, I wrote a script that I have cron run every 10 minutes that checks the temperature and pressure and if the change is greater than a certain threshold, publishes a notification to my "Weather" topic.  I'm then able to subscribe to the topic so that I'm sent an SMS when a weather notification is published.  Using SNS, I was able to set this up in a matter of minutes and now have something that will just run for me from now on.  Note that I did this on Linux as that is what is running on the machine my weather station is connected to so indeed it does work on both OS X and Linux.

One might ask, why use SNS to do the notification when I could have just had my script do it?  Great question, and if my only goal was to do just this notification for just myself, just hardcoding it in the script would be fine.  But using SNS decouples the components of the application that gives more flexibility and allows the consuming services to be independent of the producer.  It enables new styles of programming centered around asynchronous messaging.

For example, what if others want to also get the notification?  Or if rather than just sending an e-mail I'd like to have a consuming service log the notifications or perform some other processing on the data?  By using SNS to decouple the services, this is easily possible by simply adding subscriptions for each new consumer and I can avoid having to modify or maintain my script with details it really shouldn't be concerned with.

With SNS Amazon has a nice complement to the Simple Queue Service (SQS) that has been around for a little while.  Interested in learning more about asynchronous messaging?  Give one or both a try.

links for 2010-04-08: C overtakes Java; Amazon SNS; Statistics and Data; Oracle and MySQL; iPhone OS 4

• TIOBE Programming Community Index for April 2010 - C is #1 again overtaking Java!  Due in part to other languages supported on JVM but interesting nonetheless.
• Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) - Notifications/events in the cloud.  Good stuff.
• Why I'm Taking Statistics - It's all about the data!
• Oracle to Outline Strategy for MySQL - State of the Dolphin, Tuesday next week.
• Apple's iPhone OS event: What to expect -
  

links for 2010-03-31: Leadership Lessons; Rimini response to Oracle; Gmail and OAuth; Oracle closes loopholes; JumpBox eases apps on EC2; IBM buy Novell?; Apple violated multitouch patent?

• Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy - Listen to the words.
  
• Rimini Street Sues Oracle - The saga continues.
• Gmail adds OAuth support - It is great that it opens the door to new apps, but remember, while you don't have to share your Gmail password, the 3rd party app still has full access to your e-mails.
• Oracle goes all or nothing on hardware support - Closing the loopholes Sun perhaps should have years ago.
• JumpBox Jumps Ahead - Open Source as a Service on Amazon EC2 - Making the cloud easier to use.  And there is a great library available that includes MySQL, PostgreSQL, Tomcat, Ruby on Rails, SugarCRM, MediaWiki, phpBB, Drupal, Liferay, Wordpress, Jasper, and much more.  But no GlassFish or JBoss?
  
• Why doesn't IBM just buy Novell already? - Interesting thought.  But then so is IBM buying RedHat or IBM buying Canonical.
  
• Chipmaker sues Apple for violating multitouch patent - What goes around, comes around.  Jonathan's blog on the subject is interesting as is Stephen O'Grady's reasons against software patents.

links for 2010-03-25: Redis or SimpleDB?; Oracle extracting revenue from Sun customers; AWS SDK for Java

• Redis: A Warp Speed database - The author references Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle having databases so VMware needs one, but this move by VMware is squarely aimed at AWS and their SimpleDB IMHO.
  
• Oracle enacts 'all or nothing' hardware support policy - No real surprise here.  Sun customers will likely be paying more than before.
  
• New AWS SDK for Java Developers - New tools for the cloud.
  

links for 2010-02-25: Amazon SimpleDB; SOA and the Cloud; Dual Licensing

• Amazon SimpleDB introduces consistency options - For those that want traditional consistency/concurrency control in the database.
• When Your SOA Using Cloud is Too Distributed and Complex - But we are increasingly moving to more distributed systems.  The key is to not use synchronous calls where not required and use messaging as much as possible to decouple systems.
• Data vs Dual Licensing: Which Will Make More Money? - Good discussion of the challenges of dual licensing.
  

links for 2010-02-23: Stuck with Oracle or IBM?; Amazon most trusted; Apple in the enterprise

• Are you stuck with Oracle's and IBM's middleware control? - I should probably do a whole piece analyzing this, but short of that, this is a good read.  The role of open-source in combating the duopoly is an interesting and on-point observation.
• Amazon is the Most Trusted and Recommended Brand in the U.S. - Interesting that two parcel delivery companies are in the top-10 too (FedEx and UPS).
• Apple's Mac fleet gaining traction in enterprise - They were certainly popular at Sun.

Amazon Public Data Sets

I follow the Amazon Web Services Blog and recently saw several announcements about new Public Data Sets being available.  What is a public data set you ask?  From the web-site:

Public Data Sets on AWS provides a centralized repository of public data sets that can be seamlessly integrated into AWS cloud-based applications. AWS is hosting the public data sets at no charge for the community, and like all AWS services, users pay only for the compute and storage they use for their own applications.

What is cool about this is that it greatly simplifies getting access to large sets of data that while public in the past, were difficult to work with as you had to download, install, load, and otherwise provide the infrastructure for and manage all the data yourself.

The one that caught my eye was the Daily Global Weather data set.  Now, I haven't used this yet and there are other great resources for local weather station data like the Weather Underground (where I upload my station data by the way), but this is a great way to gain access to a bunch of historical weather data.  Other data sets include census data, Wikipedia data, geographic data, and more.

One drawback for data sets that are continuing to be updated each day, like historical weather data, is that you aren't accessing a continually updated data store, rather you are creating your own EBS volume from a snapshot.  This means (if I understand all this correctly) that if you need the most recent data, the snapshot must be updated regularly and you would have to update your EBS volume from it manually.  Or perhaps there are tools to assist with that.

All in all, a useful service, and a great move by Amazon to drive more users to EC2.