March 9, 2009
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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March 5, 2009
It’s become almost too easy to build a web application. The advent of frameworks like CakePHP, CodeIgniter or Ruby on Rails, have given us the chance to write code as fast as we can think it. This can almost be extrapolated to a number of fields like writing, design, filmmaking, you name it.
But with this reduced barrier from concept to delivery, comes a cost: the final product is usually not very well thought out.
Take, for instance, films like “Benjamin Button” or sites like Plinky. There’s plenty of eye-candy, but at the end of the day, they don’t do much about changing the world. That’s fine and there always be projects like these.
But when it comes to you, what would you rather work on? A meaningful project or a time sinker?
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