Software Physics

I do other things than watch Amazon, really. This is really cool stuff. I’m using the beta of Amazon’s utility computing service. The upshot is that it’s similar in philosophy to S3 - simple and just works. Compute time for a dedicated Fedora image is $.10/hr with $.20/GB of data transfer. Amazon provides stock images which you can load whatever you want in. When you’re done, you bundle and store the image in S3. Once stored in S3, you register the location of the image with the EC2 service then can fire it up directly. Read more »

I’ve spent some time writing an application based on S3 over the past two weeks. I’m very excited that this building block is in place. You can already see a number of folks digging in building tools. Some observations: Read more »

There’s nothing and everything revolutionary about Amazon’s new S3 service. In case you’re unaware of the offering, Amazon has made a storage service available. The big news: pricing and accessibility. The service is priced at $0.15/gig per month for storing data and $0.20/gig per month for data transfer. Compare this to something like XDrive, at $5.00/gig per month ($10/5gig/mo), and you get an idea as to how much this changes the current game. Read more »

Versioning is one of those potential potholes for SOA that no one really wants to think too hard about (it hurts). The problem isn’t new, it’s not even limited to technology — you publish rules that people follow; stuff gets built assuming your rules; you create a new version of the rules; stuff breaks. It doesn’t matter whether it’s software or the license renewal line at the DMV, changing the rules is tricky and can be costly. Read more »

Over the past several months, I’ve spent a lot of time with people “doing SOA”. It’s no insight to say that the term, like many before it, is unmanageably overloaded. Looking in from an outsider’s perspective (say as a business analyst) one would easily conclude that the SOA landscape is highly fragmented. Defenders of the faith might argue that “if you just got to know us a bit better” you’d see SOA as unified approach to building software. Read more »