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• Cloud Computing
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• Virtualisation

• Agile infrastructure and how Cloud Computing can help Performance and Scalability

  In an ever more agile world with test driven development and emergent design, has cloud computing come along at a perfect time to solve some of the age old problems of performance and scalability management? Let’s first look at a couple of the classic Read More... Posted 17 August 2009 11:49 by James.Saull | 0 Comments Filed under: Architecture, Engineering Practices, Cloud Computing

• How cloud operating systems aren’t quite there yet

  Shrink yourself to the size of an ant and think of a classic server as a mini data centre. Banks upon banks of memory, multiple disks, many CPU cores and even network interfaces. The OS manages all of the many processes and threads, sharing the resources Read More... Posted 01 July 2009 20:25 by James.Saull | 0 Comments Filed under: Architecture, Virtualisation, Cloud Computing

• Cloud coffee

  Cloud portability might become a topic of conversation more often as greater numbers begin to adopt their chosen cloud platform. How do we not repeat the age old “Single Vendor Lock In” in our excited rush? If the cloud provider is an Infrastructure play Read More... Posted 15 December 2008 20:29 by James.Saull | 1 Comments Filed under: Architecture, Cloud Computing

• Amazon Web Services part 2

  I should have mentioned it earlier, but the Microsoft offerings are based around Windows Server 2003 R2 and SQL Server 2005. I wonder why this is not Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008? Were Microsoft unwilling? Did it take a long time to certify Read More... Posted 27 October 2008 16:53 by James.Saull | 0 Comments Filed under: Architecture, SQL Server, Virtualisation, Cloud Computing

• Did Amazon land Microsoft on the Cloud first?!

  I received my Amazon Web Services developer's news shot last week. It followed up on recent announcements that their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offering was moving from Beta into General Availability. With that announcement came a Service Level Agreement Read More... Posted 27 October 2008 12:04 by James.Saull | 0 Comments Filed under: Architecture, SQL Server, Virtualisation, Cloud Computing

• A period of arbitrage in the Build vs Buy balance

  The rate at which .Net advances and improves is fantastic. Everything from LINQ to ASP.Net MVC via F# and parallel programming advances. The roadmap for on-premise and cloud computing shows that the future will be far from dull. Alongside the platform, Read More... Posted 27 October 2008 11:15 by James.Saull | 0 Comments Filed under: Architecture, Engineering Practices

• Partition, Federate, Aggregate and Synchronise

  It is common practice to use a partitioning function to scale out a solution. For example, you may divide a database among four equal geographical regions and have four separate installations of the database each with the same database but only a quarter Read More... Posted 04 June 2008 23:01 by James.Saull | 0 Comments Filed under: Architecture

• People and Process over Technology

  As technology and engineering zealots there is nothing we can't build. Seriously. It is all a question of time, resource and budget. And there's the rub. There comes a point in almost any business process where we hit those points of diminishing returns Read More... Posted 20 May 2008 21:42 by James.Saull | 0 Comments Filed under: Architecture, Engineering Practices

• Abstractions and Facades vs Fundamentals

  Abstractions are a beautiful thing, and it is said that any problem in technology can be solved with another level of abstraction or indirection. Tremendous. But like with most things, there is a flip side. Once upon a time you would program by hardwiring Read More... Posted 21 April 2008 21:54 by James.Saull | 0 Comments Filed under: Architecture, Engineering Practices