Welcome to Project Caroline | Project Caroline

Welcome to Project Caroline | Project Caroline: "Project Caroline is a research program developing a horizontally scalable platform for the development and deployment of Internet services. The platform comprises a programmatically configurable pool of virtualized compute, storage, and networking resources. Project Caroline helps software providers develop services rapidly, update in-production services frequently, and automatically flex their use of platform resources to match changing runtime demands."

An advanced R&D project at Sun Microsystems, Project Caroline is a hosting platform for development and delivery of dynamically scalable Internet-based services. It is designed to serve an emerging market of small and medium sized software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers. Anticipating needs driven by new SaaS business models and processes, Project Caroline helps SaaS providers develop services rapidly using high-level programming languages like the Java(tm) programming language, Ruby, Python, and Perl, to update in-production services frequently, and to automatically flex their use of platform resources to match changing runtime demands.

Key features of Project Caroline include:

• Project Caroline enables services to programmatically allocate, monitor, and control virtualized compute, storage, and networking resources. By providing programmatic interfaces for managing platform resources, Project Caroline enables developers to create services that can themselves update and flex platform resource usage, dynamically and without human intervention.

• Project Caroline resources are exposed through high level abstractions, including language level virtual machines, networks, and network accessible filesystems and databases. These abstractions can improve developer productivity by providing simplified interfaces to infrastructure resources. They also enable developers to create more robust, long-living services by insulating service code from changes to the underlying infrastructure.

• Project Caroline presents a horizontally scaled pool of distributed resources as a single system, providing developers with a unified platform for allocating and controlling these resources. In addition to simplifying developers' use of distributed resources, this unified system model also allows the platform to draw on a horizontally scaled resource pool to meet the allocation requests of multiple applications, running on behalf of multiple users.

Hurry, The Cloud Computing Platform Opportunity is Perishable! � SmoothSpan Blog

Hurry, The Cloud Computing Platform Opportunity is Perishable! � SmoothSpan Blog: "As I write this post, many are predicting that the big announcement from Google tonight will be that it’s opening up BigTable for the world to use. At least Kevin Burton and Mike Arrington think so. I hope so, because the world needs a lot more cloud computing choices. I wonder how many have figured out just how little time remains to introduce new cloud computing platforms?

Ray Ozzie has said, “[the cloud market] really isn’t being taken seriously right now by anybody except Amazon.” He’s right on the mark: it isn’t being taken seriously by anyone except Amazon. The distant runner up is Benioff’s Force.com. I say distant because there are a lot of problems with it, not the least of which is an economic model that makes it completely untenable for anyone but big corporate IT to use. Technically, it is a completely closed and proprietary environment that offers only minimal leverage. It’s true, they’re very seirous about it, so in that sense we should add them to the list, but the way they’re going about it makes it seem less than serious.

Here’s an important tip for various big industry players who’ve made noise about Cloud Computing at various points: it’s a perishable opportunity! You don’t have forever to contemplate how to get in and start winning.

"

Can Apple Break Into The Enterprise Market? It's Trying (AAPL) - Silicon Alley Insider

Can Apple Break Into The Enterprise Market? It's Trying (AAPL) - Silicon Alley Insider: "Earlier this week we wondered why Apple was looking to rent a big block of Manhattan office space. Now we have an educated guess: Apple (AAPL) may be trying to increase its very small foothold in corporate America, by establishing a support team dedicated to business clients.

Apple already provides, grudgingly, a very limited amount of assistance to businesess that buy Macs. But we hear it is taking members from a team that provides similar services for the education market and converting them to a business-focused team. Apple officials have already begun acknowledging their interest in 'industry-vertical wins, like oil, gas, and government,' we noted in March.

Why would Apple, which has always been the choice of consumers and college kids, target the business market? Because business users want to use Macs -- and are already doing so.

Yankee Group surveyed 250 companies and found that 87% now have at least some Macs in their offices, up from 48% two years ago, reports BusinessWeek, in a new cover story. It's a comprehensive look at how Apple is making headway, almost unintentionally, in the coporate market -- and why it will still has a long way to go."

Yahoo and Google May Announce Search Deal Within a Week - Silicon Alley Insider

Yahoo and Google May Announce Search Deal Within a Week - Silicon Alley Insider: "As Microsoft announces (through the WSJ) an imminent decision on Yahoo, Yahoo announces (through the WSJ) that it may sign a Google search partnership within the week. (If these two companies finally do get together, the WSJ deserves a cut of those $300 million in M&A fees.)

The search deal has also been carefully designed to reduce anti-trust concerns."

Great Presentation on REST

Overview: Check out this slide presentation to learn how REST (Representational State Transfer) compares to SOAP and the WSF (Web services framework). This presentation by Peter Lacey, Senior Analyst for Burton Group, explores these key topics and more:

http://whitepapers.techrepublic.com.com/abstract.aspx?docid=320716

http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/html/itp/burton_RESTEasy.ppt

CohesiveFT's Elastic Server On-Demand - Easy Server Provisioning

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/04/elasticserver

Complexity really is a growing problem for people. Every day we are hit with “more of everything” - more software choice, more versions, more systems and more business change. And soon - with more virtualization - more VMs. How many VMs will there be in your organization in 2010? How will they be manufactured and provisioned and will this be done in the same way as it is today? InfoQ spoke with Alexis Richardson, a founder of startup CohesiveFT, about their "Elastic Server On-Demand" product, which aims to simplify working with virtualized application stacks.

InfoQ: Please provide an overview of Elastic Server On-Demand for InfoQ readers.

CohesiveFT: Elastic Server addresses the problem of virtual machine management using self-service and automation. The Elastic Server On-Demand service delivers ready-to-run application stacks to order, for virtual server and cloud formats. It takes the complexity and uncertainty out of assembly and deployment lifecycles by replacing multiple manual steps and scripts, with a single automated process that is both quick and easy to use. We give you a place to create and share servers, or reproduce them from recommended patterns, with speed and quality.

InfoQ. How do I use Elastic Server?

CohesiveFT: Say you have an application, written for Ruby on Rails, and you want to run test builds on your laptop but move to a data centre in production - for instance on Amazon EC2. No problem. On the Elastic Server site you’ll see a collection of portals each catering to a different technology community or product pattern. Choose the Ruby on Rails portal and customize the components you want in your base stack - e.g. Rails 2.0.2, Mongrel 1.1.4, PostgreSQL libraries, and some RubyGems. Now press ‘build’. That’s it - in a few minutes you can be running your Rails server on EC2.

Choices can be saved as a template, so you can reuse the same configuration and run it on your own hardware in other formats, currently VMware, Parallels, or Xen. This is why we call servers “Elastic” - you have one server recipe, but keep the flexibility to reuse it across multiple business cases and technology platforms. Every aspect of this is managed in a consistent way in one place. Additionally, every server has a web console and API for organizing maintenance functions such as network settings, security, audit, and lifecycle.

twittervision

twittervision
its been around for a while but still pretty compelling. Twitters tweets mashed with Google Maps.

How journalists can master Twitter (blogger’s cut) � Online Journalism Blog

How journalists can master Twitter (blogger’s cut) � Online Journalism Blog
It’s almost impossible to sum up Twitter in one line. To some, it is a way of delivering content to mobiles as headline text alerts. To others, it’s a social networking tool for getting contacts and leads. Some use it as a research tool for developing stories; and still others as a project management tool to gather a number of contributors together - for example, drivers posting updates on traffic.

IT Conversations | O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference | Werner Vogels

IT Conversations | O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference | Werner Vogels: "One of the key difficulties in running and managing an internet business lies in building a technical infrastructure that can handle spikes in traffic but which remains cost-effective for normal operations. In other words, businesses often need to be able to scale up or down at a moment's notice."

Dutch Hospital Installs Sun MD Container - Data Center Knowledge

Dutch Hospital Installs Sun MD Container - Data Center Knowledge: "Data center containers are gaining traction, and Sun Microsystems (JAVA) is the latest company to reveal a new customer. A Sun MD S20 (Blackbox) unit has been bought and installed by the Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Joerg Schwarz of Sun has photos showing the process of installing a Sun Modular Data Center, including detailed views of the preparation of the pad. As with several previous installations, the 'Blackbox' is actually white (I guess the black version with the green logo looked better in marketing brochures)."

Sun was the first company to make headlines when it introduced the "data center in a box" concept in October 2006. Container-based data centers have since been introduced by Rackable Systems (RACK), Verari Systems and most recently by IBM (IBM) with its iDataPlex series.

Here's a recap of the other Sun MD customer deployments that have been made public:

• The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) became the first site to deploy a Sun MD last July, using the unit to boost its scientific computing capacity by a third. The SLAC has since purchased a second unit.
• Mobile Telesystems, the largest mobile phone operator in Russia, has deployed several Blackboxes to manage remote operations.
• Belgium-based Hansen Transmissions is employing Sun MD S20s in its program to expand wind turbine and industrial gearbox manufacturing facilities in India and China.
• 30 Blackbox units will be lowered into a former coal mine located 100 meters under the ground in Japan's Chubu region. Sun is part of an 11-company joint venture building the data center, with other partners including Internet Initiative Japan (IIJ and BearingPoint (BE).

Gartner: iDataPlex is the Future of Servers - Data Center Knowledge

Gartner: iDataPlex is the Future of Servers - Data Center Knowledge: "Gartner released a research note Tuesday on the shift in the server market towards Web 2.0 and high performance computing, exemplified in IBM's launch of the iDataPlex server last week. Gartner analysts John Enck, Andrew Butler and Carl Claunch believe that 'innovation in packaging will continue to drive data center density.' An excerpt:

Sales of servers in the Web 2.0 and high-performance computing (HPC) niches are outpacing those in the general server market. These two segments currently have unique requirements: Purchasers want the lowest-cost, lowest-overhead server, but with the most efficient power management and cooling. IBM's iDataPlex is explicitly targeted at these market segments and provides IBM with an architectural framework for addressing the emerging interest in cloud computing. ... Although iDataPlex is not appropriate for most enterprises today, it points to where server hardware is heading. Servers have evolved from tower servers to blade servers mounted in a chassis — and now the rack itself is becoming an integral part of the server.

Gartner said it expects similar offerings from a number of mainstream vendors within the next two years."

A Web-Scale Computing Architecture

IT Conversations | O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference | Werner Vogels: "One of the key difficulties in running and managing an internet business lies in building a technical infrastructure that can handle spikes in traffic but which remains cost-effective for normal operations. In other words, businesses often need to be able to scale up or down at a moment's notice.

These problems affect companies of all sizes and are as relevant to an enterprise trying to shave costs as they are to a start-up.Werner Vogels presents the Amazon solution and shows how their S3 (Simple Storage Service) and EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud) offerings provide a blueprint for 'Web-Scale Computing'. Vogels contends that this allows businesses to outsource their 'heavy lifting' and implement an elastic business model that can quickly respond to demand.

Vogels introduces customers who are already using these business models. One of these is our very own Doug Kaye, who describes how Gigavox Media is exploiting the potential of Amazon's web services."

Thoughtstream: Firefox, Google, Cloud Apps, and Mesh | sarahintampa

Thoughtstream: Firefox, Google, Cloud Apps, and Mesh | sarahintampa

Aptana to Launch Cloud Platform

Aptana to Launch Cloud Platform: "When released, Aptana Cloud will be the first elastic application cloud with ready-made Web stacks for the most popular scripting languages, 'featuring the most popular and widely adopted Web infrastructure, ready to use and scale as you need it,' Hakman said. 'You can develop on your desktop and sync out to the cloud.'

Aptana Cloud features ready-to-go services, such as PHP, MySQL and Apache Web servers. In addition, Aptana Jaxer enables AJAX developers to use their JavaScript and AJAX skills on the server-side to build entire applications, data services or presentation tiers that complement PHP and Ruby On Rails.

“Ruby on Rails is what's next on deck for Aptana Cloud support, and Python would be a natural extension, too.' Hakman told eWEEK.

Meanwhile, Aptana Cloud is built to complement cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon, Google and Joyent, Hakman said. Aptana's initial cloud computing partner in the effort is Joyent."

Microsoft’s elephant in the OS room: Apple | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

Microsoft’s elephant in the OS room: Apple | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com: "In our Pacific Crest Mosaic surveys, we have seen increasing evidence of Apple taking share in the enterprise market. While Apple is not the only reason for the Microsoft Client shortfall, it seems plausible that it could be a larger factor than acknowledged by Microsoft. As a result, we are somewhat skeptical of Microsoft’s assumption that its Client revenue will snap back next quarter."

Typical Programmer - Relational Database Experts Jump The MapReduce Shark

Typical Programmer - Relational Database Experts Jump The MapReduce Shark: "In this article relational database experts David DeWitt and Michael Stonebraker compare MapReduce to traditional relational database systems (RDBMSs) and find MapReduce wanting. They make some strong points in favor or relational databases, but the comparison is not appropriate. When I finished reading the article I was thinking that the authors did not understand MapReduce or the idea of data in the cloud, or why programmers might be excited about non-RDBMS ways to manage data."

"MapReduce has the same relationship to RDBMSs as my motorcycle has to a snowplow — it’s a step backwards in snowplow technology if you look at it that way."

from the comments to this post:

"Other articles I’m inspired to write based on the referenced article: I tried using MapReduce to create a website, and it sucks compared to markup with CSS. It doesn’t have any concept of how to style a website. MapReduce is a serious step backward in terms of web design.

I also tried to have MapReduce babysit my kids, and I came back half an hour later to find that it was just sitting there crunching data, and wasn’t watching them at all. This thing can’t do anything at all.

Also, compared to a standard hammer, this MapReduce things is really crappy at pounding nails into things."

MapReduce: A major step backwards - The Database Column

MapReduce: A major step backwards - The Database Column: "As both educators and researchers, we are amazed at the hype that the MapReduce proponents have spread about how it represents a paradigm shift in the development of scalable, data-intensive applications. MapReduce may be a good idea for writing certain types of general-purpose computations, but to the database community, it is:

1. A giant step backward in the programming paradigm for large-scale data intensive applications

2. A sub-optimal implementation, in that it uses brute force instead of indexing

3. Not novel at all -- it represents a specific implementation of well known techniques developed nearly 25 years ago

4. Missing most of the features that are routinely included in current DBMS

5. Incompatible with all of the tools DBMS users have come to depend on

First, we will briefly discuss what MapReduce is; then we will go into more detail about our five reactions listed above."

As noted below, David DeWitt has recently been given a major gig heading up a new database research lab for Microsoft at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. -- MG

Create PDFs via Code with Adobe Share API

Create PDFs via Code with Adobe Share API

Adobe has updated Share, their service for document sharing and management, so that users can now convert uploaded documents into PDF and they also have exposed this functionality in the Share API. This is a useful enhancement that should broaden the utility of the service (we previously looked at the Adobe Share API in our coverage of 10 Online Storage APIs).

OAuth Coming to All Google Data APIs

OAuth Coming to All Google Data APIs
Like the feature on many cars today where you give the parking attendant a special key to your car that gives him some, but not all, access to your vehicle. On the Web you now have your own keys to dozens of sites but how to best handle the mashup-style case of site A wants you to grant them access to get some data from site B? Ideally you don’t want to give site A your password to site B. OAuth aims to simplify this problem: “It allows you the User to grant access to your private resources on one site (which is called the Service Provider), to another site (called Consumer, not to be confused with you, the User).”

Backlash starts against 'sexy' databases | Reg Developer

Backlash starts against 'sexy' databases | Reg Developer: "Holland, who said he understands the shortcomings of a relational database but also knows its strengths, concluded: 'The bottom line is don't tell me RDMBS can't scale if you can't write a decent query or design a normalized database schema.'

Elsewhere, evangelists have been taken to task for hype, by 'fawning' and posting comments 'verging on satire' in their support of the new wave - specifically, SimpleDB. Todd Hoff praised SimpleDB for eliminating much of the complexity of traditional RDBMS systems by dispensing with tiresome technicalities such as data schema and normalization. He said such things are unnecessary for many web applications.

Defending RDBMS, computer science student Ryan Park listed 10 reasons for avoiding SimpleDB, CouchDB and Google DataStore. Among them: data integrity is not guaranteed, complicated reports and ad hoc queries will require a lot more coding, and relational databases are scalable even with massive data sets.

'Mr. Hoff's supposed advantages are actually serious disadvantages to the paradigm. Before designing your architecture around a database engine like SimpleDB, it's important to consider the reasons not to do so,' Park wrote."