March 2009 archives

  1. Facebook’s growing infrastructure spend

    On Thursday BusinessWeek reported Facebook is seeking new financing for its data center operation growth in 2009. Facebook continues to add new members and their associated content at an extremely fast pace, with most new growth coming from international markets. Facebook needs to expand its abilities to serve these markets by bolstering current infrastructure offerings and cutting latency to its members through new international points of presence. In this post I will take a deeper look at Facebook's current computing infrastructure and related expenses and examine likely new areas of investment in 2009.

    Read more...

  2. Create enhanced results on Yahoo! and Facebook with Share markup

    Yahoo! announced support for enhanced search results last week based on Facebook Share and RDFa markup. Website owners can add a few meta tags to their pages to boost click-throughs from a more visual Yahoo! Search result and east the process of sharing a link on Facebook at the same time. In this post I will cover the major categories of enhanced share types -- audio, images, video, news, blogs, games, documents, and multimedia -- and walk through how site owners can stand out on shareable platforms.

    Read more...

  3. Measuring efficiency in the cloud

    In the world of cloud computing every action has a cost. Every HTTP request fires off a chain of actions, each uniquely measured on a variety of billable meters. Gone are the days of idle or unused resources on our local servers. Cloud computing charges by the sip (when sips are available) aligning business goals of resource efficiency and its cost. The cloud computing world shares many similarities with the plug-in and go world of electricity, including the need to run green for the sake of resources and cost savings. What can the world of green energy teach us about the future of cloud computing? How can we measure computing resources in the cloud for efficiency, replacement costs, and cost savings?

    Read more...

    • Posted on
    • Updated at

  4. The anatomy of cloud computing

    Cloud computing is changing the way we provision hardware and software for on-demand capacity fulfillment. Lately I have been thinking about the ways on-demand servers, storage, and CDNs are changing the way we develop web applications and make business decisions. In this post I will provide an overview of the cloud hosting landscape with a particular focus on cloud utilization by web companies. I will walk through a managed infrastructure stack and examine a few major business targets.

    Read more...