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Cloud no longer a single vendor game. For years cloud computing has been synonymous with Amazon whose Amazon Web Services really created and defined the space. In the past year other providers have matured and in some areas even surpassing Amazon. Link to this post!

Justin Hileman and I gave a presentation on “Augmenting RDBMS with NoSQL for e-commerce” at the PgEast 2011 conference. This presentation is really the sequel (no pun intended) to my presentation, MongoDB & Ecommerce : A Perfect Combination. This presentation takes you through how we created a hybrid solution blending both sql and nosql to achieve …

Earlier today RackSpace announced that they are releasing their Cloud technologies as Open Source under the newly formed project OpenStack. RackSpace is the second largest cloud provider, behind cloud computing pioneer, Amazon. They have partnered with some of the largest names in the industry to create Open Stack including NASA, Dell, Citrix, AMD, Intel, Right …

Image by Kyle May via Flickr Every so often a “new” technology catches on. RIght now it’s nosql databases. A couple years ago it was Ruby, before that it was java. Each arise because they propose a solution to an existing problem, or in other words a better way of doing something.. something, but not …

Image by langalex via Flickr Amazon, Digg, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter all started on sql databases (all but Amazon on MySQL) and have transitioned to incorporated nosql databases into their infrastructure, though many utilize both relational databases as well as non-relational ones. I’ve compiled a few resources to help bring you up to speed on nosql …

Image via Wikipedia Every self respecting linux, mac os X or *nix user should have a solid handle on managing jobs in unix. The following will explain how to run tasks in the background, bring tasks to the foreground, background already running tasks and keeping a task running while logged out. Link to this post!

Image via Wikipedia du is the *nix command for disk usage. It tells you how much space everything in the given directory is taking up. GNU du introduced a handy option -h making it human readable, or showing sizes using K, M, G rather than bytes. Unfortunately this makes it not sortable numerically. Here’s how to sort …

Image by HeyThereSpaceman. via Flickr Today I was visiting a friends office and like many offices in NYC they have a shared bathroom in the hall for the entire floor. In this building it had five buttons on the door that when pressed in the correct order unlocked the door. A simple password. In our …

Image via CrunchBase Amazon has done it again bringing another computing service to the masses. This time it’s the Content Delivery Network or CDN. Cloudfront is a direct competitor to other popular CDNs such as Akamai. While Akamai requires a fairly substantial amount of traffic to become a customer, Cloudfront doesn’t. It follows all of Amazons, pay …

Image via Wikipedia Someone asked me a question today “Why would anyone choose SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) instead of REST (Representational State Transfer)?” My response: “The general rule of thumb I’ve always heard is ‘Unless you have a definitive reason to use SOAP use REST’”. He asked “what’s one reason?” I thought about it …