Posts with keyword: infrastructure

5 entries

The Run to Ubiquity

Fri Aug 15 09:45:00 2008

Craig Burton has written a nice essay on why software infrastructure behaves differently, economically speaking, than other products and why that upsets the natural inclination most people have relative to protectionism. That, of course, is what the whole net neutrality debate is about. As Craig says, artificially disrupting the "run to ubiquity" in the software infrastructure on which we all depend, disrupts all players: all So here is my point about the inverted supply and demand model; today's core software infrastructure is made up of a core set of services. Roughly, file, print, web, database, directory, security, and the
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Velocity 08: Puppet In-Depth and Hands-On

Tue Jun 24 18:10:00 2008

The final talk of the day (hope I make my flight) was by Luke Kanies of Reductive Labs on Puppet. Most automation tools are based on SSH and as a result, they suck. The problem is that the intersection of administrator and developers is very small. Luke wanted Puppet to be so good it was like bringing a gun to a knife fight. The goal: manage lots of machines with very little effort. Luke makes an analogy about the transition from assembly to C and moving from commands and files to "resources." Resources are abstract and portable. Abstraction is
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Using Amazon's EC2

Thu Aug 24 14:25:00 2006

Jon Udell has a screencast of an application he wrote running on Amazon's just announced EC2 metered compute platform. According to Amazon, each instance "predictably provides the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth." Need more capacity? Add it right now. I think many large IT shops will be doing similar things soon with virtualization. Rather than buying servers from Dell or someone on demand, they'll order a bunch of servers up front, have an outsourced services provide install them, and then just create virtual
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Selling Sprint Short

Wed Aug 16 11:20:00 2006

If I owned any stock in Sprint-Nextel, I'd sell it. I just spent 60 minutes on the phone resolving a billing issue. It's too complex to explain in detail, but suffice it to say that Sprint's billing system wasn't up to the task of the change their sales office made on one of my accounts and, as a result, they got a costly support call. 20 minutes of that call was spent by the support rep, who was very nice, and his supervisor hand calculating my bills. If they get calls like this on just a small percentage of
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Ways of Thinking, Ways of Doing

Wed Oct 12 09:49:00 2005

In a recent column, Jon Udell says "much of what seems to be modern innovation is, in fact, rediscovery of ... Lisp and Smalltalk." He goes on later to say: If existing tools can do more than we realize, we could spare ourselves a bit of grief. But probably not a lot. Translating ways of thinking into ways of doing always takes longer than we predict. From The spiral staircase of SOA | InfoWorld | Column | 2005-09-28 | By Jon UdellReferenced Wed Oct 12 2005 09:55:00 GMT-0600 (MDT) This is an interesting point and one that's under-appreciated, particularly
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