Enterprise level mashups
We are seriously considering offloading some of our data storage and hosting needs to Amazon Web Services, and if that works out - it most certainly will - we 'll offload some more and take it from there.
Amazon has quietly been building a google-grade, highly scalable, reliable and distributed in nature infrastructure, while most folks would disregarding it as an e-tailer. The largest e-tailer, but 'just' an e-tailer nevertheless. They were wrong. Bezos is not to be taken lightly.
Secure Storage Service(S3) is the AWS's flagship service. In short, it allows for 'unlimited' data storage and access of arbitrary data objects ( AKA files ) consolidated into buckets ( psudo-directories ). Its trivial to access the service via its XML (REST and SOAP ) based API. Its super-cheap ( especially if you happen to be dealing with the kind of price tags ISPs in Greece attach to their related offerings ) and, how about that, it works.
It's been suggested before and it gets more obvious by the day. With a very little sum of money, lots of will and dedication and, preferably, with a good idea to ago along, a bunch of guys can build the next Youtube. Delegate the storage and hosting to AWS, setup a few servers ( you can 'hire' virtual servers on AWS's Elastic Compute Cloud for 10 cents / hour ) to do your bidding, use blogs for free ( and highly effective ) PR, and hey-presto, money and fame are pouring in.
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and an ever increasing companies are offering similar services ( software as a service, where did I here that before ) which you can bring in together, mash-them-up and you are set. Scalability, distribution and reliability is implicitly guaranteed by the service providers. We are entering this business sooner or later. All our services ( we love modules and components here ) have been designed to be accessible via XML (XML-RPC, REST, SOAP, JSON etc) . Also, we are big on clusters and fault tolerant systems so just about everything is already in place. In fact, everything has been in place for over 5 or so years, since we switched to the new architecture model.
We live in interesting times. Interesting things happen all the time. Go ahead, build the next big thing and contribute to that interest factor. Trust me, you are going to have a whole lot of fun doing it.
Saturday, 16 June 2007 6:52 pm
Summer in the city
Traditionally, summer is a chance for most of us to de-accelerate and de-compress, given that most of our web properties users and most of our business partners and customers are too, doing the same thing. Summer provides the chance to toy around with some ideas ( R&D playground galore ), revisit some issues that were not really that important to begin with just because the spirits are high. All in all, deviate from the norm and sometimes even go wild.
Alas, this is not true for this summer. Too much work piled up during winter+spring, more keeps on piling ( clearly, contradicting the de-acceleration metaphor I used earlier ) and, as if that wasn't enough, summer time is severely affecting the collective productivity and thinking capacity of the team. After all, it is summer - the beach, parties, nights out, you get the picture.
For the past few days I have been working on a updated new component for our Switch framework. It is bound to take a few more days until it gets to the point where I will even know if its going to work. In the mean time, our bugs/features tracking system's list is growing by leaps and bounds, our individual TODO lists ( everyone has his own preferred way to keep track of things ; many of them are aggregated back to that system ) are over populated, demand from every front is rising ( which of course is great, from a business perspective ) and, sometimes, all that you can do is stare at the ceiling as if it ( the ceiling ) will somehow help you deal with those issues. It never does, at least not directly.
We need to get more people (job openings) and find a way to deal with the summer. Preferably, get some more smart folks aboard so that even summer won't be able to affect our karma.
Wednesday, 13 June 2007 11:28 pm
PBlogs - latest developments
The fine folks here at the development team of Phaistos Networks are almost done with making PBlogs multilingual ( the system is now in place and we can make any service we chose to support as many languages as we please, ain't modules a great thing? ), as well as added a few more features and some wiz-bang stuff on the management side. On related note, my brother just created his blog. Huzza!
Friday, 4 August 2006 10:04 pm
