Posts tagged ‘web development’
Review: Programming Collective Intelligence
Programming Collective Intelligence is a book about applying data mining techniques to analyse collections of data. There is submerged information in Ebay prices, in Facebook profile networks, in collections of movie reviews, in news sites, in the stockmarket; this book by Toby Segaran shows ways to extract, visualise, understand, and predict that information.
Amazon adds persistent storage to EC2 »
Amazon is adding persistent storage as an option to EC2 — currently it’s in private beta.
Previously, disk storage on an EC2 was transient:- when the machine was shut down or crashed, it felt like a hard drive crash. (And you’d lose your IP address too, but Amazon added static IPs a little while ago too.) The path to reliability was to use S3, but that can’t be mounted as a native file system.
The persistent storage appears as a raw, mountable filesystem that needs to be formatted. You’ll be able to make a quick snapshot of the data, for backup. No word on pricing or its performance, but you’d expect it to be aligned with S3.
There’s been the option of mounting S3 in EC2 using davfs, which mounts with WebDAV, but that’s a bit of a hack and one wonders what the performance would be like.
Scalr: auto-scaling web app hosting in EC2 »
Scalr is a fully redundant, self-curing and self-scaling hosting environment utilizing Amazon’s EC2.
It allows you to create server farms through a web-based interface using prebuilt AMI’s for load balancers (pound or nginx), app servers (apache, others), databases (mysql master-slave, others), and a generic AMI to build on top of.
The project is still very young, but we’re hoping that by open sourcing it the AWS development community can turn this into a robust hosting platform and give users an alternative to the current fee based services available.
This looks like it could be great when it develops. I kind of think that Amazon themselves should be providing this kind of executive service to auto-scale and -heal an application deployed in their grid (and wouldn’t be surprised if they add it as their service matures).
“We” being Intridea, a web dev shop
How-to: Optimize your site for speed
Does your website load as quickly as you — and your users — would like? If not, here’s a detailed set of proven guidelines aimed at improving the speed of your site.
Amazon adds static IP addresses to EC2 »
This is great news: Amazon EC2 now lets you reserve static IP addresses, and allocate them to your instances. Previously, IP addresses were dynamic — if you shutdown an instance, or it crashed, the IP that it had was lost: it would go back into the general allocation pool.
This makes EC2 much more viable for running public web sites, because now you can set up a load balancer on a static IP, and not have to worry about dynamic DNS, and clients that ignore TTLs.