Topic: Amazon

Getting CloudTools to Work with Grails 1.1.1

Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, December 22, 2009 @ 4:46 pm

photo credit: °Florian

Yes, Cloud Foundry has been acquired by Spring Source and seems to be morphing into a for-pay service, and there hasn't been a new build packaged on the Cloud Tools project page since January of 2009, but if you dig in the SVN repo, you see there's a bit of activity. Before I try building from source, I wanted to see how hard it would be to get 0.6 Grails plugin working with a Grails 1.1.1 app.

Well, harder than I thought. There's a real lack of documentation around cloudtools for one, and the radio silence on the project page over the last few months hasn't helped. Fortunately, Don over at AlterThought has put together a nice post that covers most of the pitfalls and problems with the CloudTools Grails Plugin. A few things they don't address and I thought I'd throw in here:

Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (0)

Software Development

Why the Behemoths Can’t Innovate

Dietrich Kappe, Monday, December 14, 2009 @ 5:29 am

photo credit: sanchom

In some past posts I've looked at some of the cultural, organizational and process issues on why large companies find it hard to innovate with new, quality software. Today I want to take that process a step further and look at why established players have such a hard time innovating in general.

First two anecdotes, where I will combine the topics of Susan Boyle, chess and the Kindle. First, chess and the Kindle.

So I now am the proud owner of two Kindles, the small format Kindle 2 and the large format DX. It's great for reading novels, less so for reading reference books where you jump around a lot (even setting and using bookmarks in a small 30 page PDF is a pain). There are two areas where the Kindle falls short: there are very few chess books for it and there are even fever German language books. Hopefully that will change with the advent of the international Kindles and soon amazon.de will start selling ebooks.

Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (0)

Software Development

What will Happen to a Giant

Joe Gillespie, Monday, July 6, 2009 @ 4:08 pm

Although I’ve seen so many players rise and fall over the years, what has inspired this post is the irony of what is happening to Microsoft. In the early years of my technology career it was Microsoft’s ownership of the PC O/S market that primarily allowed other compatible hardware manufacturers to create innovation and eventually marginalize IBM’s dominance of that market.

In the early years of PCs, the applications on top of the O/S weren’t even Microsoft applications. It was only later that Microsoft started developing their own applications and with them the predatory practice of squeezing out other application providers to rule the desktop.

Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (0)

business rules engines

The courage to redesign

Brian Dillard, Monday, November 3, 2008 @ 5:12 pm

People are still griping about the recent redesigns of Facebook and iGoogle, but I think we should cheer on any company brave enough to disregard user feedback and embrace change.

Lots of big-name, highly successful sites eventually reach a state of paralysis in which they're too scared of alienating their customers to examine their interaction design and information architecture from a fresh perspective.

The cautionary tale of Amazon.com

Look at Amazon: The online retailer adopted DHTML navigation just last year - at least 5 years after most other big sites - because its tab interface had grown so comically large. Nevertheless, huge chunks of the Amazon user experience are still massively broken:

• Once you've started down the checkout process, the site tries to keep you from getting back to your shopping cart to add or remove additional items. If you use your back button to do so, you've got to start the checkout process all over again.
• Wish lists offer perhaps the most confusing, error-prone user interface I've ever had the displeasure to experience.
• Link targets on a wide variety of UI controls are tiny and persnickety enough to elicit involuntary profanity.

Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (0)

Software Development

Everything’s Coming Up Windows

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, October 30, 2008 @ 7:07 pm

I've been beating the drum of cloud computing and the advantage that it gives to companies building solutions on Linux. Microsoft needed to respond. Well, now we have two solutions for Windows on demand:

• Amazon EC2 is offering Windows on EC2, with the pricing at $0.125 per hour for a small instance running Windows Server (as compared to $0.10 for a Linux instance). You can run SQL Server Express at no extra charge. The SQL Server Standard smallest instance (Stadard Large) rings in at $1.10 per hour, however, which ain't such a good deal.
• Microsoft's Azure Services Platform. It's still in community evaluation mode, but there is one thing that is already clear about it: it's as confusing as all git out. One of the advantages of Amazon's services like S3 and EC2 is that they are simple and can form the building blocks for other applications and services.

If I'm provisioning a web application, I'm pretty comfortable thinking in terms of virtual servers or instances. Not sure how to think about scaling and cost with Azure. I think MS would have done better to start out with a KISS approach to drive adoption. Time will tell if their "it can cure cancer" approach will work out.

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (0)

Software Development

Microsoft to Jump on Board EC2

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, October 2, 2008 @ 12:57 pm

Hold on to your hats; Microsoft has just made a radical change in business model. A couple of months ago I wrote about the competitive advantage that firms using Linux and Amazon's EC2 cloud computing had over their competitors.

Server-on-demand providers like Amazon's EC2, Joyent,
and others have reduced the capital necessary to launch scalable,
server intensive businesses. Google has just launched a similar
on-demand service, and companies like RightScale and CohesiveFT are building mature businesses around managing EC2 configurations.

...

Facebook applications are just the most extreme example of business initiatives that can be scaled on demand from $70/month on one EC2 server to $10,000/month on many dozens of servers running web, application and database server clusters and farms. Compare that with the old school of investing in a large data center with a significant fraction of the hardware and bandwidth that you might need if your business is a success. What used to cost $100k in capital can now be done with just a few hundreds of dollars.

...

And it's all possible as long as you are using a unix variant - Linux for the most part - to power your apps. So there is a whole class of companies out there using Linux that can out compete their Windows-using rivals - again, the capital they need to launch is much smaller because of cloud computing. That means Linux will win among the class of young entrepreneurial businesses that are so vital to the US economy.

Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (2)

Software Development