Rapid7 secures new funding. Microsoft drops Dryad. And more.

# Rapid7 secured $50m in series C funding.

# Microsoft confirmed that it is ditching its Dryad project in favour of Apache Hadoop.

# Arun Murthy provided more details of Apache Hadop 0.23.

# The Google Plugin for Eclipse and GWT Designer projects are now fully open source.

# openSUSE released version 12.1.

Read the original article at $1000 per hour Servers, Anyone?

Amazon's spot market for computing power is set up as an open market for surplus servers. The price is dynamic and depends on demand. So when demand is low, you can get computing instances for rock bottom prices. When you do that you normally set a range of prices you're willing to pay. If it goes over your top end, your instances get killed and re-provisioned for someone else. Obviously this wouldn't work for all applications, like a website that has to be up all the time, but for computing power, say to run some huge hedge fund analytics, it might fit perfectly.

A recent post on SEO MOZ alerted us to an interesting story where spot instances spiked to $1000 per …

When I spoke at Percona Live (video here) on running an E-commerce database in Amazon EC2, I briefly talked about using RAID 10 for additional performance and fault tolerance when using EBS volumes. At first, this seems counter intuitive. Amazon has a robust infrastructure, EBS volumes run on RAIDed hardware, and are mirrored in multiple availability zones. So, why bother? Today, I was reminded of just how important it is. Please note that all my performance statistics are based on direct experience running a MySQL database on a m2.4xlarge instance and not on some random bonnie or orion benchmark. I have those graphs floating around on my hard drive in glorious 3D and, while interesting, they do not necessarily reflect real-life performance.

Why? …

In the press in the last two days has been the reported outage of Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in just one North Virginia data center. This has affected many large website includes FourSquare, Hootsuite, Reddit and Quora. A detailed list can be found at ec2disabled.com.

For these popular websites was this avoidable? Absolutely.

Basic scalability principles if deployed in these systems architecture would have averted the significant downtime regardless of your development stack. While I work primarily in MySQL these principles are not new, nor are they complicated, however they are fundamental concepts in scalability that apply to any technology including the …

At the recent MySQL User Conference, I had a talk on how we at Recorded Future use Amazon EC2 to keep our servers humming (the slides for the talk are available here). And of cource, Amazon EC2 turned back on me (and us all at RF) about a week later. I will not go into details, but somehow, we still don't know exactly why ("The cleaning lady unplugged THE SERVER to plug in the vacuum-cleaner", "The dog ate my network"?).

The thing has been down for 24+ hours now, and there is no end in sight, as far as I can tell. As I said in my talk, we are considering a move to Amazon RDS instead of running our MySQL servers ourselves, and one of my first reactions to this trouble was that we really should have done that already. That was until I realized that the Amazon RDS service was affected as well. Which …

And I mean that, come see me, say hello, buy me a beer (extra points!). Or even more so, come see my session at 10:50 on tuesday morning April 12. I'll be speaking on how to manage large datasets in an Amazon EC2 environment, and this is largely based on my experiences at doing just that at my new job (or new, I've been doing it for more that 6 months now) as Database Architect at Recorded Future.

This will not be an incredibly technical presentation, in terms of showing actual code and things. Rather, I will look at some of the issues when running in an EC2 environment, and how we manage it here at Recorded Future. Also, I will present a bit of how our architecture works, which is more relevant that one may thinks, as we have Cloud based architectures on mind all the time, all our development, testing and productions servers run in the cloud.

Anyway, this is …

Netflix went down over three hours ago, and everyone is on edge here. My son just started reciting the script to "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" in an attempt to keep our courage up. This may be the last thing I ever write, so — Oh, never mind, it's back up again ... Crisis averted, and on to this week's developer news.

We have an App Store Appstore for that!

Amazon this week unleashed their own Appstore for Android devices. Apple took umbrage at the use of the (evidently trademarked) term "App Store" and fired a salvo of …

Paranoid Android. Canonical and Gnome. A new OSI. And more.

Paranoid Android
If you are interested in the potential violation of the GPL by the Android kernel you have probably already immersed yourself in the numerous blog posts published on the topic. If not, start with Sean Hogle’s analysis or Bradley M Kuhn’s overview of the original allegations and work backwards from there, not forgetting a detour for the obligatory Microsoft connection. Linus Torvalds said claim “seems totally bogus”. In the meantime, Microsoft …

Amazon's AWS team has published a series of whitepapers covering various scenarios for migrating into AWS cloud infrastructure. Links to these whitepapers are provided below for your convenience:

- Migrating applications to the AWS cloud
- Migrating web application
- Migrating batch processing applications
- Migrating backend processing pipelines