From the category archives:

Cloud Computing

Building A Social Application on the Cloud Part 1: Why build it on the cloud?

April 10, 2009
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I’ve always been a David Letterman fan and one of the most famous sections of the show is the Top Ten List. Basically they pick a theme from current news and make a funny list around it, sorting the ones that are the most funny on the top.

I thought that this would be a great social tool to build: a crowdsourcing tool for Top Ten lists. But having people create ten items sounded like too much, so I decided to pair it down to five.

Thus I had my application: The Top5.

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Building A Social Application on the Cloud

April 10, 2009
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As I do more and more research about the Cloud Area Network, I’ve also found that people (technical and non-technical) still don’t get a clear grasp of how and why we should build applications that run on the cloud.

I thought the best way to explain the concept was by building a simple application that would use infrastructure as well as logic that would demonstrate the approach and the benefits of a cloud app.

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Moving My Blog to the Cloud

March 9, 2009
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A week ago I decided to put my blog where my mouth is. I am writing a book on cloud computing and services, and needed some hands-on experience on the latest technology available. I had tried Amazon Web Services aabout a year ago and wasn’t impressed with their offering; the tools were Java-based and somewhat cumbersome. I was in for a surprise. The main reason: Amazon’s Graphical Management Console.

Amazon now allows users to manage servers using a graphical control panel that allows you to do most tasks using a point and click interface (for a sneak preview of what it does, see this video by Mike Culver, one of Amazon’s Web Services Evangelists).

In this post I will try to explain some of the concepts that you must have in mind if you’re thinking of moving some of your servers to the cloud.

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The Cloud Area Network

February 19, 2009
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It’s been only a little over a decade since its inception, but we already live in a world where the Internet is something we can’t live without. We communicate, share media, influence people and research every possible topic with the click of a mouse.

But the web is an ever evolving, almost live organism. There’s a change, an undercurrent, that has been forming in the past two years. It is still invisible to most people, but an army of developers and futurists are tapping into it. It will revolutionize, once again, the biggest network of all.

I call it the Cloud Area Network.

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This Cloud Will Rain a Thousand Entrepreneurs

September 29, 2008
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For entrepreneurs, the web is like a sky full of possibilites. With very little investment they can go to their basement, code every night for two weeks and come out with the next Facebook.

But guess what happens if their little project gets picked up by a major blog like Slashdot or ReadWriteWeb. The site’s shared-hosting server gets pounded by millions of requests, and all of a sudden there’s a huge problem: They need money to buy more servers and a cabinet in an expensive datacenter.

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