Rich Sharples' Blog » amazon

Vacation Reading List

sharps — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 16:37:04 +0000

I haven’t actually read a book, any book for about 5 years. I use audio books exclusively – from iTunes or Audible. The main reason is convenience – I find I can listen to an Audio book much more frequently than I can dip into paperback. Driving, walking, at the gym, loading the dishwasher. I can also carry around 5 or 6 books on my iPhone. As such I get through a lot of (audio) books. I’ve just finished Neal Stephenson’s Anathem (Amazon, Audible) which is a monster at almost 1000 pages – carrying around such a hefty tome and actually finding time to read it have been tough, as such I may never have finished it. Which would’ve been a shame.

Audio books aren’t perfect – anything with formulas or diagrams doesn’t work so well (though publishers usually provide an link to online content in these cases) and the range of avalable titles is still behind your favourite online book store.

Anyway, I’ve just downloaded my Christmas vacation reading list which at the moment looks a bit dry so I’m looking to add some fiction or something on US history – recommendations gratefully received :

Groundswell by Carlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research.
The Numerati by Stephen Baker
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

So what’s on your Christmas reading list ?

Tab Sweep – The Cloud

sharps — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 02:45:16 +0000

Office neighbour Aaron Darcy chatting with Cote from Redmonk about our JBoss on Amazon EC2 beta.

No sooner was the ink dry on the annoucement – the JBoss Portal team show you how to get JBoss Portal running in the cloud as well – which, as you would expect, is like running JBoss Portal anywhere else.

Our friends at Hyperic have created a nice dashboard for monitoring the cloud : CloudStatus – which I presume is all based on RHQ – if so JON 2.0 managing JBoss in the cloud can’t be far behind.

One interesting problem of on-demand utility computing – is knowing where you application is running or legally can run – will you need an export control license as your application follows the moon ? Which country’s data privacy legislation do you need to comply with as your application is migrated to where the cheap computing power is ?

Meanwhile – Google just won its largest GMail migration from Outlook/ Exchange – 1.5 million mailboxes. Now Google has to determine if it’s worth moving the cloud closer to the users to reduce international bandwidth requirements.

Nephological News

sharps — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 12:01:21 +0000

I’ve been involved in middleware long enough to remember when it could easily cost $75k just to get up and running with a Java application server (hardware and software licenses). How far things have come – as of today you can use Amazon EC2 to run JBoss instances so your capital investment is approximately zero; aside from a one time setup fee – you just pay by the instance / hour and *that* won’t break the bank.

You can learn and or sign-up here – have your credit card handy

Head in the Cloud

sharps — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 14:55:37 +0000

A couple of related articles hit my (nicely organized) feed reader this morning. First, Tim Bray paints a bleak picture of Google’s Developer Platform – some concerns I shared earlier. Meanwhile CogHead are in the news with their Open Definition model – an attempt to build an open and collaborative environment for CogHead customers. Interesting but CogHead is still fundamentally a sharecropping model – once you’ve committed to CogHead – your stuck with it. I’m not saying that’s all bad. It’s a tradeoff – leverage CogHead’s f5g awesome platform but box yourself in. Sound familiar ?

It’s interesting that we’re seeing (at least) three models emerge :

Amazon’s utility computing approach (they’re fundamentally a bandwidth, MIPS and storage utility) – you choose what platform you want to write to (Linux, Java, etc.);
the proprietary SaaS platform approach (SalesForce, CogHead – sorry guys). You trade convenience, agility for complete dependence on the vendor.
a hybrid – Google App Engine, Facebook. I don’t think these hybrids have anywhere near the ability to lock you in as much as the true SaaS platforms. For example – Google is based on Python, Django – if you’re smart you won’t get locked in. Many facebook apps. also support other ‘distributions’ – so it isn’t really a sharecropping model.

As I see it – the only thing that might lock you in to Google and Facebook’s model is convenient access to their huge customer base – that’s what they’re selling. Take it or leave it.

Competition is a good thing

sharps — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 11:38:40 +0000

Yesterday Google announced Google App Engine – essentially a competitor to AWS (Amazon Web Services) providing storage, execution and secure, reliable “web I/O”. Right now – you have to write your apps. in Python;but they also provide Django (web app framework for Python) – which is pretty neat from the little I’ve seen of it. Looks like they also provide some additional hooks for using Google’s auth. and mail services – which I guess could be Google’s attempt to make these cool new apps. “Google only Apps.”.

Potential Evilness aside, this is a pretty exciting time if you’re developing an app. for the Web – the cost of deploying / hosting your cool idea is no longer a hurdle. Competition is a good thing.