Cloud Application Architectures

Cloud Application Architectures. By George Reese, O’Reilly 2009. (Here’s a link to the publisher’s site).

This is a great book on how to build apps in the cloud! I was happy to see how much depth it went into. It’s short — 150 pages plus some appendixes — so I was expecting it to be a superficial overview. But it isn’t. It is thorough. And it is also obviously built on his own experience building very specific applications that he uses to run his business — he isn’t preaching about stuff he doesn’t know first-hand. Finally, George Reese is a good writer! It’s impressive. This is how he covers so much ground with so much depth in so few pages, …

Ken Jacobs departs Oracle. Linus loves his Nexus One. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# As Matt Asay noted, Ken Jacobs’ departure from Oracle is a significant loss for MySQL.

# Linus Toravlds gave the Nexus One his personal thumbs-up.

# Glyn Moody outlined the H.264 video standards debate.

# Oracle job cuts affect GNOME accessibility work but, as Joe Brockmeier pointed out, the blame lies with everyone.

# SourceForge project administrators …

EC2 is nifty, but it doesn’t appear suitable for all needs, and that’s what this post is about.

For instance, a machine can just “disappear”. You can set things up to automatically start a new instance to replace it, but if you just committed a transaction it’s likely to be lost: MySQL replication is asynchronous, EBS which is slower if you commit your transactions on it, or EBS snapshots which are only periodic (you’d have to add foo on the application end). This adds complexity, and thus the question arises whether EC2 is the best solution for systems where this is a concern.

When pondering this, there are two important factors to consider: a database server needs cores, RAM and reasonably low-latency disk access, and application servers should be near their database server. This means you shouldn’t split app and db servers to different hosting/cloud providers.

We’d like to hear your thoughts on EC2 …