Link Collection (weekly)

• The Amazon.com 2010 Shareholder Letter Focusses on Technology – All Things Distributed

  SOA, data management advances, cloud computing and more, in use for Amazon’s core business:

  “Our technologies are almost exclusively implemented as services: bits of logic that encapsulate the data they operate on and provide hardened interfaces as the only way to access their functionality. This approach reduces side effects and allows services to evolve at their own pace without impacting the other components of the overall system. Service-oriented architecture — or SOA — is the fundamental building abstraction for Amazon technologies. Thanks to a thoughtful and far-sighted team of engineers and architects, this approach was applied at Amazon long before SOA became a buzzword in the industry. Our e-commerce platform is composed of a federation of hundreds of software services that work in concert to deliver functionality ranging from recommendations to order fulfillment to inventory tracking. For example, to construct a product detail page for a customer visiting Amazon.com, our software calls on between 200 and 300 services to present a highly personalized experience for that customer.”

  “The storage systems we’ve pioneered demonstrate extreme scalability while maintaining tight control over performance, availability, and cost. To achieve their ultra-scale properties these systems take a novel approach to data update management: by relaxing the synchronization requirements of updates that need to be disseminated to large numbers of replicas, these systems are able to survive under the harshest performance and availability conditions. These implementations are based on the concept of eventual consistency.”

  tags: amazon soa cloud information_dissemination

• Drenched by the Cloud | CFOworld

  The cloud is not a substitute for planning, architecture, risk management and common sense. Know what you are doing. The finger pointing here should not be at Amazon, but the decision-makers who naively delegated all control to someone else.

  “Already Downing and his team have taken significant steps to ensure they are never caught like this again. “We’ve had a series of meetings here internally to review all points of failure in our cloud strategy. We’re digging deeper to find out where data is hosted and what the backup plans are for that data,” he says. He adds that he’ll be hosting the main database at an additional cloud service for redundancy – a cost he calls blatantly necessary in light of this situation.”

  tags: amazon cloud management

• Silicon Valley and the technology industry: The new tech bubble | The Economist

  Is there a bubble? Or is the bubble conversation a bubble?

  “With luck the latest web bubble will do less damage than its predecessor. In the 1990s internet euphoria caused a dramatic inflation in the price of telecoms firms, which were creating the infrastructure for the web. When internet firms’ share prices plummeted, telecoms investors suffered too. So far, there has been no sign of such a spillover effect this time around. But the globalisation of the internet industry means that many more people could be tempted to dabble in web stocks in the current boom, adding to the pain of the bust.

  When will that be? This paper warned about both the last internet bubble and the American property bubble long before they burst. Irrational exuberance rarely gives way to rational scepticism quickly. So some bets on start-ups now will pay off. But investors should take a great deal of care when it comes to picking firms to back: they cannot just rely on somebody else paying even more later. And they might want to put another bumper sticker on their cars: “Thanks, God. Now give me the wisdom to sell before it’s too late.””

  tags: technology investing

• The Sensors Are Coming! – NYTimes.com

  ”Sensors will be everywhere in the next few years and will be able to help people become more conscious of the environment and our own health,” explained Mr. Vigna. “Your socks, shoes, glasses and even your garbage can will have sensors inside designed to help you manage everything from your effects on the environment to your health.”

  tags: instrumentation internet-of-things active-information

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.